


a force more powerful

by kateandbarrel



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Apocalypse, Developing Relationship, Drama, Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Iron Man 3 Spoilers, Post Iron Man 3, Romance, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-16
Updated: 2013-06-16
Packaged: 2017-12-15 03:05:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/844576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kateandbarrel/pseuds/kateandbarrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been a year since the events of Puente Antiguo, and Jane foster hasn't given up on her dream to open an Einstein-Rosen Bridge to Asgard. After shrugging off SHIELD's lackluster support, she ends up getting help from two unlikely new friends, Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. After Thor arrives on Earth, everything seems exactly how Jane wanted it. </p><p>Until the planet goes dark.</p><p> </p><p> <i>Stealth crossover with Revolution. It isn't necessary to have watched Revolution to understand this fic.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	a force more powerful

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chosenfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chosenfire/gifts).



> This fic is written for Chosenfire, shipswap 2013. Chosenfire requested Thor/Jane (or Thor/Jane/Tony, which I couldn't manage to do, but I included as much Tony in there as I could), and a variety of prompts that were really hard to just pick one of. Some major threads are: Thor returning to Earth post-Avengers, a developing relationship, and I tossed in a bit of hurt/comfort in there too. :D I also had the fortune of being assigned someone who was my friend. The main plot thread of this fic came from a discussion we'd had a while ago, in which we lamented the lack of Avengers/Revolution crossovers, and we wondered how they would all manage in that world. So, in planning this fic, that conversation popped into my head, and I ran with it. I hope you like it, Krystal. :D
> 
> Regarding the Revolution crossover: no characters from Revolution appear. Basically, I just stole the idea from Revolution and put it in the Avengers-verse. You don't need to have watched Revolution to follow the fic. Also a spoiler warning: if you are planning to watch Revolution in the future, I do spoil some of the plot in this fic, although it diverts from canon.
> 
>  _"There is a driving force more powerful than steam, electricity, and atomic energy: the will."_ \- Albert Einstein

One of the lights in Jane’s lab, the one right above her desk, was flickering. 

It had annoyed her at first, and she’d had every intention of getting the attention of one of the maintenance workers to fix it, or to tell Jarvis to get someone to fix it. But as soon as the thought would enter her brain, it would be out again a second later, because her mind was already somewhere else. The curse of the scientist.

She kept forgetting to have it fixed, and eventually, it stopped bothering her. And then it became something of a comfort. It was like a beacon; a focus for her mind. Difficult equation? Design roadblock? _Lean back, stare at the ceiling, and let the flickering light lull your brain back on track._

It was on this particular day that Jane’s main problem was to do with power consumption, and regulating the output of an arc reactor so as not to overload the system she’d so carefully crafted. She still didn’t fully grasp the arc reactor design; it was an area of science different from her own, and incredibly advanced. She’d need help with it.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

Jane shot upright in her chair, knocking over a mug in the process. “Jesus, Pepper! You startled me,” she laughed and righted the (fortunately empty) mug. 

Pepper smiled and strolled into the room, perching on the edge of Jane’s desk. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know. Same old. Slow but steady wins the race.” Jane scratched her chin. “I’m having trouble with the arc reactor though.”

“Do you want me to get Tony in here? Nobody knows the things better than he does.”

“Yeah, that’s true...” Jane trailed off noncomittally. 

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Tony - it was still weird calling him Tony, just casually calling Iron Man _Tony_ \- but he wasn’t the easiest person to work with.

Pepper raised her eyebrows expectantly.

“It’s just,” Jane started, “I’m sure he’s got better things to do?”

“Like what? He’s sworn off his obsession with the suits. He’s only got the one, now. The Malibu house is gone. He’s actually here in Stark Tower most days, now. Usually in Bruce’s lab annoying him. He’d probably relish the opportunity to have an entirely new person to annoy.” Pepper laughed at Jane’s wince. “He’s here today. I could go get him.”

“As much as I hate to admit it, I probably do need his help. God, this whole thing would have been so much easier if I could have just gotten my hands on a nuclear power source. If only the government weren’t so snooty about who they let have access to those things.”

Pepper patted Jane on the arm and stood up. “One Tony Stark coming up. We’ll get your Einstein bridge... thingy up and running soon enough.”

Jane nodded her thanks. She was more than just grateful to Pepper Potts. She was indebted to the woman, not just for all the funding and lab space she’d provided, but because she was the only one who seemed to believe in Jane at all. 

After SHIELD had all but shelved Jane’s project, she’d almost lost hope. It was almost like SHIELD didn’t _want_ her to be able to bring Thor back. Well, considering SHIELD had hidden her away during the Battle of New York and refused her requests to see Thor, she thought SHIELD could go take a long walk off a short pier. 

Shopping around for new investors had been tricky, and she’d really only tried Stark Industries just to say she’d exhausted every avenue. Jane never would have expected Pepper Potts to be the only one to even call her back. 

Jane stood and stretched. She crossed her (generously sized, _thank you Pepper_ ) lab to where she had the arc reactor schematics strewn across a table, and waited for Tony.

***

“No, no, those numbers are all wrong,” Tony said, exasperated. “See, here.”

Jane stared where he was pointing at the paper. “That chicken scratch is a 53? I thought it was a 68! No wonder my simulations have been so off!”

“I told you you had it wrong.”

“Well excuse me, but who taught you had to draw a schematic anyway?” Jane tapped at her keyboard, updating her data with the correct numbers.

“My process is one that’s highly refined and very particular to me.” Tony crossed his arms defensively.

“Particular to you, well that’s for sure. You’re the only one that can read your own writing.”

“I have a system that’s worked for me for years. And I don’t particularly _want_ people to understand how the arc reactor works.” Tony rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

Jane paused her typing and looked at him. “You don’t? Why?”

“Too many different ways to weaponize it.” Tony shrugged and tossed his pen on the table. “I can’t let that happen.”

“There are always risks. But sometimes the risks are worth the reward, especially for new technology.” 

“I’m taking a risk with you, aren’t I? When Pepper first told me you wanted an arc reactor, I said no. Uh uh. Not happening.”

Jane blinked, surprised. She hadn’t heard that. “What changed?”

Tony shrugged. “She convinced me. She trusts you, so I’m taking a chance and trusting you too. Besides, Thor’s an okay guy. I figure his girlfriend is _probably_ not gonna go crazy and try to blow up the world. Though his track record with personal relationships is kinda 0 for 1 right now.”

“Well, thank you for the vote of confidence. I think.” She turned back to her keyboard and resumed typing. “I’m not Thor’s girlfriend, though. We barely know each other, really.”

“If you say so,” Tony said. He picked up his pen again and doodled on the edge of a notepad. “He was worried about you.”

Jane cleared her throat. “Oh?”

“Uh huh. He asked about you. Coulson told me.”

Their exchange was so very high school. And so was the warm feeling that formed in Jane’s stomach at Tony’s words. She bit down on the inside of her cheek to stop herself from grinning. “It was a professional courtesy, I’m sure.”

Tony leaned on the table, his chin in his hand. “I’m sure.”

“Can we get back to the issue at hand, please?”

Despite their occasional squabbling, it turned out that she and Tony worked fairly well together, once they got into a groove. They spoke the same language, which was immensely helpful. (Jane missed Darcy a lot, but she didn’t miss having to explain every other thing she said.) Jane was fairly certain if you looked up the word “sass” in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Tony Stark there. But she soon realized there was a lack of any vitriol behind his attitude, and she started letting his quote, unquote, _witty remarks_ slide off her back. Once she just learned to let Tony be Tony, it was so much simpler working with him. 

After helping to solve her initial problems with the arc reactor, Tony stuck around to offer more assistance. And then he showed up again the next day, bright and early. Well, bright and early for him, which was around 11am, four and a half hours after Jane had gotten there. The next day after that, he showed up at 10am, and brought her a fresh, hot coffee from a nearby coffee shop. It had made her tastebuds sing after weeks of the crap she’d been brewing in the little coffee pot in her lab. Seeing the expression on her face, what Jane would probably have only been able to describe as _unbridled ecstasy_ , Tony brought in coffee every day after that.

Jane had estimated she had maybe a month’s worth of work to do final calculations and simulations, and to finish constructing the device to open the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. With Tony’s help, it took only two weeks.

***

Jane watched the image of a wireframe wormhole elongate, waver, then stabilize on the computer screen. In a small command window over the top, numbers and code streamed by impossibly fast, too fast to read. A timer in the corner of the screen counted down, and when it hit zero, the image of the wormhole reversed in on itself, shrinking smoothly into a little white dot, and then nothing. A window popped up that coolly declared _SIMULATION SUCCESSFUL_.

“So, was that it?” Tony asked, standing next to Jane, shoulder to shoulder. They both continued to stare at the pop-up message.

“That was it,” she replied. Jane let out a breath. The final simulation had run smoothly. 

“It’s gonna work. We’re gonna open a wormhole.” Tony sounded like he couldn’t believe his own words.

“That’s the plan. Well, either that or we implode all of reality in the blink of an eye,” Jane said lightly. “But the risk of that is really small. Not even worth mentioning, really.”

“That’s what I like about you, Foster. Always the optimist.”

Jane grinned, and turned to give Tony a hug. She jumped up and down while holding onto him, until he gently pried her off. She pressed her hands to her cheeks, which were flushed with excitement, and she looked at the screen again. Jane couldn’t believe the time had finally come. She was going to open a bridge to another _world!_ “We’re going to need someplace to open the bridge. We can’t do this in the middle of New York City.”

“Why not? The footprint of the bridge is only a few feet.”

“Won’t it attract a lot of unwanted attention?”

“Who cares? We aren’t SHIELD. Besides, they deserve to deal with the aftermath for kicking you to the curb.”

Jane grinned. “Alright, where then?”

“I’ve already had one portal to space opened on the roof of my building. Why not another? Just promise me one thing,” Tony said seriously.

“What?” Jane asked.

“Tell me I don’t have to fly into it. I’ve done the fly into a wormhole thing. It sucked.”

“No flying. Scout’s honor.” Jane held up three fingers in the scout salute.

“You were in the scouts?”

“No, but I would have been. If they’d let in girls. Instead I learned how to start a fire using sticks in my garage and nearly burnt down the house.”

Tony nodded. “Sounds about right.”

***

The two of them had had designs to set up Jane’s equipment on the roof and fire it up right away. But Jarvis had butted in about it already being past dark, and Miss Potts would surely prefer they wait until they’d both had a good night’s rest first.

Tony had acquiesced, and instead invited Jane to eat dinner with him and Pepper. Dinner had been nice, but afterwards Pepper had opened a bottle of celebratory champagne, and then another, and the three of them had ended up sitting on the floor of Tony and Pepper’s top floor apartment suite, drunk, and laughing their asses off.

“So, wait, Thor is the god of _thunder_?” Pepper slurred.

“Yup,” Jane said. “B-o-o-m,” she spelled.

“But doesn’t he travel around on bolts of lightning?” Pepper hiccuped. “Or something?”

“He’s got the whole deal,” Tony said, gesturing with his glass hard enough that a few drops spilled out onto the floor. “Thunder and lightning.”

“So why isn’t he called the god of lightning? Or god of lightning ‘n thunder?” Pepper sipped at her champagne flute. 

“Because god of thunder sounds way awesomer,” Tony said, with a _duh_ tone heavy in his voice.

“Maybe it’s something else,” Pepper said, a hint of mischief in her eyes. “Maybe it’s just a nickname from college, right? Like, that’s his reputation in the bedroom.”

“Oh, is that it Foster?” Tony turned to her. “Does Thor bring the thunder _in bed?_ ” 

Jane coughed; if she’d had champagne in her mouth she would have choked on that, but she managed to choke on her own saliva instead. “No! I- I mean, we didn’t-”

“Look, she’s getting red,” Pepper said to Tony. “Aww.”

“Did we embarrass you? Is this is a sore subject?” Tony held his hand out in a mock show of support. “Was he not able to perform?”

“I only knew him for a couple days! We never even got that far,” Jane said.

“But you wanted to, didn’t you?” Pepper grinned. “Don’t even deny it. I saw the clips of him on tv. He’s hot. If I wasn’t hopelessly in love with this fool here, I’d go for him. You’d have some competition.”

“Actually, I’m okay with that,” Tony said. “Y’know, if you two ladies want to get together, with Thor. I’m down with watching...”

“You’re a pig!” Jane said, but she laughed. “How do you put up with it Pepper?”

“She likes it,” Tony said. He had to duck to avoid Pepper’s attempt to smack him upside the head. “Admit it!”

“No!” Pepper put her glass down and crossed her arms. “I’m going to cure you of it, one day. You’ll see, you’ll be a perfect gentle-”

She was cut off by Tony placing a kiss on her lips. They pulled apart after a long moment and looked at each other, eyebrows raising in some sort of silent communication. Jane cleared her throat.

Tony turned to her. “We’re just gonna-”

“Go,” Pepper finished.

“Yeah, okay,” Jane replied quickly, picking up clearly on innuendo. “Night guys.”

“Sleep on the couch. Jarvis will tell you where the spare blankets are!” Pepper shouted over her shoulder as Tony led her out of the room.

Jane grinned to herself and reached for the champagne to pour herself one last glass. 

“Congratulations, Dr Foster,” she said aloud to herself, and took a sip of the drink. “Your life’s work has been achieved.”

Or would be, once they’d successfully opened the bridge the next day and Thor arrived safely on Earth.

Jane finished her glass and then set it down on the floor. A glance at the clock told her it was past midnight. She thought about heading back to her apartment anyway, but she stood up and the room swayed dangerously. The offer of the couch suddenly sounded just fine to her.

“Doctor Foster, there are spare blankets and pillows in the closet outside the second bathroom,” Jarvis’ voice floated out pleasantly from a speaker somewhere nearby, though Jane couldn’t spot it in her drunken haze.

“Nah, I’m good,” she waved off the computer. She flopped down on one of the couches and pulled off her flannel, draping it across herself like a blanket. “Just gonna... curl up here...”

Jane closed her eyes, and an image of Thor’s face popped up in her mind’s eye. Her drunken mind was bold enough to pose the question to herself of why she was really doing this. Was it for Thor? Or just for the science?

“Science,” she mumbled to herself. Jane snuggled her face into a throw pillow. “100... percent... science.”

She quickly fell asleep.

***

“Rise and shine, Doctor.” Jarvis’ voice was loud in her ear.

Jane grunted.

“It’s time to get up,” Jarvis persisted.

She rubbed at her eyes and tried to open them, but found the brightness of the morning sun a bit much to handle. She threw her arm over her face. “What time issit?” she mumbled.

“It is 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Normally, I would let you sleep, however, daylight is running out, and you have already delayed a day,” Jarvis said pleasantly. 

Jane grunted again. Why’d she drink so much? Stupid delicious $300 bottles of champagne.

“The weather forecast is calling for clear skies this afternoon, zero chance of snow. Perfect portal-opening weather.”

Jane removed her arm from her face and blinked her eyes open, albeit painfully. “Jarvis, are you just going to talk at me until I get up?”

“Yes.”

Jane cursed Tony’s name for designing such a smart AI, and sat up, swinging her feet down to the floor. Her head swam dangerously. She placed a hand against her forehead, and yelled at herself again for drinking so much. _Well, this will be a grand way to greet Thor. “Hey Thor, how’s it going? Oh, no, no kissing please, I’ve got hangover breath.”_

She dragged herself off the couch, dropping her flannel on the floor and not bothering to pick it up. She shuffled over to the sink at the bar and poured and drank a glass of water. The stickiness in her mouth and throat cleared up and she felt marginally better. She poured herself another glass and sipped on it, while considering taking a shower. Jane had no spare clothes with her to change into. She wondered briefly if Pepper would loan her any clothes, but then she thought of herself in one of Pepper’s designer label, stylish suits and laughed. _Yeah, that wouldn’t look out of place at all._

Jane was saved from the internal dilemma by the appearance of Tony. An aura of steam and soap smell wafted out around him as he swept into the room. “Shower’s free,” he said. “You can use the bathroom in our room.”

“I don’t want to wake Pepper,” Jane said. She drank some more of the water, hoping the growing pain in her skull was just a dehydration headache. 

“Pepper? She went off to work this morning.”

“What?” _How the hell did Pepper come back from a night of drinking and go off to work first thing in the morning?_ Jane mused.

“Feeling off? You gotta learn to hold your liquor, kiddo,” Tony said and flopped onto the couch.

Jane rolled her eyes. “I just don’t have the years of experience at it that you do.”

“That’s harsh. That’s cold. You really hit me right here.” Tony thumped at his chest, right where his arc reactor used to be.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Jane said, but she smiled. She was beginning to enjoy the easy banter they fell into. 

Jane decided to go ahead and take that shower. She figured if she washed the lingering scent of booze out of her hair it wouldn’t be so bad to put on the same clothes afterwards. But she didn’t even have to do that - Tony shouted through the door halfway through soaping up her hair that Pepper’s assistant had brought up some new clothes in Jane’s size. Apparently Pepper had sent her out to buy some things just for Jane.

“Being rich is amazing,” Jane marvelled, and ducked her head under the spray of water. Being friends - she was finally comfortable calling Tony and Pepper that - with rich people was actually kind of cool. Especially when they funded your life’s work.

She finished her shower as quickly as she could. By the end, the hangover fog had mostly lifted. She found a bottle of Tylenol in the medicine cabinet and took a couple to chase away the lingering headache. She looked at herself in the mirror: mostly fresh-looking, thanks to the hot water and fancy soap that the all-French label indicated was imported. Jane used her fingers to brush out any tangles and arrange her hair somewhat nicely. She should probably blow dry her hair, but she was in too much of a hurry now. 

“It’s time,” she said to her reflection, which echoed her nervous smile back at herself. “Let’s do this.”

***

Jane kneeled on the roof, ignoring the way the gravel up bit into her knees as she typed at the laptop plugged into her device. She had discarded her gloves in favor of faster and more efficient typing, and the tips of her fingers were already numb from the cold. Tony stood a few feet back, hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, a scarf wrapped around most of his face.

“Mmph phhfm mphph?” Tony asked incoherently through the scarf.

Jane looked over her shoulder with an _are you kidding me?_ look.

Tony pulled down the scarf. “Are you almost finished?”

“Yeah, I just need to...” Jane turned back to her computer and trailed off as soon as she started typing again. It was quicker to just do it than to explain. She saw Tony out of the corner of her eye, checking on the connections to the small arc reactor plugged into the device. 

“So, we’re just gonna wait for Thor to show up?” Tony asked.

Jane nodded.

“How’s he gonna know?”

“He’ll know.”

“You know that he’ll know?”

“Yes. I’ll wait as long as it takes,” Jane said. Maybe her faith was irrational, but she didn’t care. She trusted Thor, and he had made a promise to her. Jane stopped typing and leaned back. She looked at him. “It’s done. I just have to hit start.”

Tony met her look, and raised his eyebrows, encouraging her. She rested her index finger on the enter button. She could barely feel the cold plastic under her numb finger. She sent a silent prayer out to the god of wormholes, whoever that might be, and pushed the button.

A loud humming erupted from the device, followed almost immediately by a bright jet of light that shot into the sky. 

Jane jumped to her feet and backed up. Tony came to her side, and they both stared up at the sky. The white light disappeared into a cluster of clouds that had formed out of nowhere, and were growing, filling the blue sky with dark grey.

Tony tried to say something, but whatever he was going to say was cut off by a loud thunderclap from above them. A second later a small shockwave emanated from it, blowing out in all directions, including down, straight at the pair on the roof. Tony and Jane were knocked over by the force of the it.

Jane had known there would be some meteorological side effects of opening the bridge, but these were a bit harsher than she had expected. Jane crawled over to the laptop and tried to bring up the monitoring program she had running in the background. The strong winds combined with the icy cold meant she’d now lost all feeling in her fingers, and she had to hit backspace and retype several of her commands. Eventually she got there, and after reviewing the lines of code, turned to grin at Tony.

“Well?” Tony shouted above the roaring storm above them.

“It worked! There’s a connection!” Jane shouted back. She crawled back to Tony, and they leaned against each other to get back on their feet against the strong winds.

“Where is he?”

“He’s on his way,” Jane said forcefully, believing it fully.

The two stood together, staring at the pulsating beam of light. Jane’s hair whipped painfully over her face. She kept brushing it behind her ear, despite that the wind kept dislodging it a second later.

“He’s on his way,” Jane repeated, quieter, to herself. _Please, Thor, be on your way._

There was a loud crack and a flash of light. A bolt of lightning had come out of the roiling storm clouds above, tracing a path along the sky. Another soon followed, then another. A surge of electricity filled the air. Jane could feel it along her skin, making it tingle, little hairs standing on end. She gripped Tony’s arm, barely able to contain her excitement.

The ray of light streaming widened and grew brighter, eventually forcing Jane and Tony to hold up their hands in front of their faces. There was another loud clap of thunder, and through the spaces between her fingers, through the bright column of light reaching into the clouds, Jane saw a dark form falling from the sky.

Another shockwave emanated from above and knocked Jane and Tony down again. Jane was on her back on the roof, the breath knocked out of her, and she watched as the storm clouds above dissolved away. The column of light was gone. The winds died down, and the sun began shining again, albeit meekly through the frosty February day.

“Jane?”

If Jane hadn’t already been trying to catch her breath, hearing that voice again would have made her lose it. She brought herself up on her elbows and saw, standing next to the device that opened the very first wormhole on planet Earth - _well, a wormhole that didn’t need a tesseract. And, well, that she knew about, anyway_ \- was Thor. He was as tall and imposing as she remembered; his hair was a bit longer and pulled away from his face. His clothing seemed fresh and new; his cape fluttered behind him in the slight breeze left behind. His hand gripped Mjolnir aloft, the metal of the hammer reflecting the sun brightly.

“Hi,” she said, feeling slightly stupid, lying there on the ground, and with nothing better to say. Why hadn’t she thought up what she would say to him when she saw him? A year spent trying to make the damn thing happen and she’d never considered how it would go if she did. 

Jane laughed, partly at herself, and partly just from the aftermath of the adrenaline rush. She moved to get up, and Thor quickly crossed the distance between them to offer his hand in assistance. She grabbed onto it and he pulled her up. His hand was incredibly warm, and hers was so cold - it almost hurt to hold onto him. But she didn’t let go. She looked up into his eyes. They were as brilliantly blue as she remembered.

Her eyes dropped to his lips, and -

“Thor, buddy, good to see you again,” Tony was saying, and Jane realized she’d forgotten he was even there. He slapped Thor on the shoulder. Jane let go and moved back, scratching awkwardly at her head, suddenly wishing Tony hadn’t come along after all. 

“And you,” Thor replied jovially.

“How’s our crazy bag of cats doing back home in Asgard?” Tony asked. “He up to any trouble?”

Thor narrowed his eyes, but answered. “He is incarcerated. He hasn’t been _up to_ any trouble. But I do not wish to speak of that.” He turned to Jane. “You did it.”

Jane smiled and shrugged. “I did it!”

“I knew that you would. Heimdall saw your progress. He told me when you were close.”

“Oh, good,” she said. She remembered reading about Heimdall in her Norse mythology research, and tried not to think about how surreal it was to have had an all-seeing god watching watching over her.

“Maybe we should move this inside, it’s getting pretty cold out here,” Tony said. “I’ll go pour us a round of drinks. Meet you downstairs.” He turned to wink at Jane, then left.

Jane rolled her eyes but was glad he’d left. “So, I tried to see you when you were here, in New York,” she said to Thor. “But I was in Norway. SHIELD wouldn’t let me leave.” She hadn’t meant to bring up that subject so quickly, but it just popped out. Apparently she still felt the sting of that missed connection.

Thor put his hands on her shoulders. “Jane, I wanted desperately to see you. But, I had to deal with Loki, I had to bring him home. There was no one in my place who could do it. It was my duty.”

Jane nodded. She’d heard an abbreviated version of the story from SHIELD, and then later, a better one from Tony and Pepper. But she wanted to hear it from Thor. “How did you get here, before? Why couldn’t you come back again?”

Thor dropped his hands. Jane missed their presence immediately. “I had to destroy the Rainbow Bridge. Loki was trying to use it to destroy another world. That has cut Asgard off from travel amongst the realms. My father was able to send me to Midgard through the use of dark magics. It was ancient magic, spells mostly forgotten even by those who practice it. To do it exhausted my father. He fell into the Odinsleep afterwards.”

Jane nodded, though she wasn’t fully understanding everything he said. Science and magic may technically be the same, but at that moment it felt very far apart. “Did he wake up?”

“He did,” Thor smiled. “As much as I wanted to see you again, I could not ask my father to perform the magic again. It mattered not; I knew you would succeed.”

Jane smiled back at him, even though she could barely feel her lips anymore. Tony had the right idea, they should really get inside. “We should -” she pointed at the door. 

“Wait,” he said. He reached out to brush back a strand of her hair that had fallen across her forehead. “I am truly sorry.”

Jane looked into his eyes, and knew he meant it. She knew it should have made her feel better, to get that apology, to know he hadn’t forgotten about her. Instead it just made her feel foolish. He was a _god_. And he was apologizing to her? Because he had important things to do, way more important than hanging out with her? “It’s fine,” she said, and she meant it.

“No. I made a promise, and I failed to keep that promise.” Thor looked pained at that. If nothing else, Jane was glad that the growth he’d made in his short time on Earth had stuck around. 

Jane took his hand in hers. It was big, and warm, and just holding it made the entire last year worth it. No matter what else happened now, it was worth it, because her theory was right. She’d opened an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, and nobody could take that accomplishment from her.

“Your skin is like ice!” Thor proclaimed. 

“Yeah, Tony had the right idea, we should really get inside,” Jane said, and tugged him along towards the door.

They left the roof, Jane’s device sitting innocuously among the pebbles, the screen on her laptop blinking out the message _CONNECTION COMPLETE._

***

The three of them were having a shot of scotch, both to celebrate their success and also to warm up the humans among them, when Pepper burst through the door, shouting “What the hell was that?”

“Jarvis?” Tony asked accusingly. 

“Sorry, sir, but she threatened to have me uninstalled if I warned you of her approach.”

Jane was sure Tony had too many safety measures in place for anyone to touch Jarvis, but it was funny all the same. 

“We decided to open the bridge here,” Tony said. “Look, honey, we have a god in our living room.”

Pepper looked where Tony was pointing and stopped short. Her eyes went large as she took in the whole picture: huge blond Norse god wearing an ostentatious outfit, holding one of Tony’s little shot glasses, the city of New York framed in the window behind him. “Wow. Hi.”

Pepper’s reaction felt familiar and it made Jane smile. “Thor, this is Pepper. Pepper, Thor,” she said.

“It is an honor to meet you,” Thor said. 

“Likewise,” Pepper said. She came to herself a little, and said to Tony, “this doesn’t excuse anything. I was in the middle of a business meeting six blocks away -” Tony put his glass down and went over to her, nodding in acceptance of her scolding. “- and SHIELD interrupts me with an urgent phone call to ask why Stark Tower has its own personal thunderstorm. They thought Loki had come back for round two or something.” She sighed. “You could have at least told me what you were planning.”

“Sorry, Pepper,” Jane said.

“It’s not your fault Jane,” Pepper replied. She smiled at Tony. “I know who to blame.”

“It was either this, or Central Park,” Tony said. “I hate leaving the city this time of the year. You know it’s even colder in upstate New York. Here we have that heat island effect.”

Jane finished her drink then set the glass down on the counter while Tony and Pepper bickered. After last night, one was definitely enough. Thor set his empty glass next to hers.

“I see the man of iron has changed little since I saw him last,” Thor said. “He still squabbles pettily with everyone.”

“It’s his way,” Jane said. “So I have to ask, are you, like, king of Asgard now?”

“King? No,” Thor said, but he didn’t sound particularly upset. “I was not ready. My father and I agreed on that. I have much yet to learn.”

“Sorry.”

“Do not be. I am not sorry. If I were king, I would not have been able to come to see you.”

“Oh. Well, then, I’m not sorry.” Jane smiled. 

Thor returned her smile. It was a warm and open smile, the kind that came from a genuine soul. Jane found some of the feelings she’d had for Thor back during their tumultuous three-day adventure come bubbling to the surface again. Maybe she had to admit it that all of her hard work and efforts hadn’t been 100% for the science. About 98% science, maybe. 2% Thor.

His hand found hers, and he rubbed his thumb against the back of her hand. “I missed you,” he said.

“I missed you too,” she replied.

Alright. 

8% Thor.

***

Eventually Pepper noticed what was going on in the corner of the room, and dragged Tony away to give Jane and Thor some privacy. Jane found she almost missed them, as the sudden quiet between her and Thor felt loaded with tension. She didn’t know what to say, or what to do with her hands, and she couldn’t stop smiling stupidly every time she looked at him. 

She wandered to the wall of windows, wanting something to do, and Thor followed. “Probably looks a lot different from the last time you saw it,” she said. Most of New York had been fixed in the seven months since the battle. New York City was the financial capital of the world; it wouldn’t do to have it be full of smoking rubble for long.

“Indeed. Your people are resourceful.”

Well this was scintillating conversation, Jane thought. _C’mon Foster! Be interesting! Be funny!_ She looked over at Thor, who was studying the city below. His face was relaxed, but his eyes were sharp as he scanned the buildings. She wondered if he was reliving the battle in his mind. Although he was still so very _Thor_ -like, he seemed so different.

All thoughts of trying to be funny flew out of her head. He was who-knows-how-many-hundreds of years old, and the time difference between last year and this year must seem like nothing to him; yet before he seemed almost like a boy, and before her now was a man. Jane touched his arm - somehow his armor felt warm to the touch, surprising her. 

Thor put his hand over hers. “Will you come to Asgard with me Jane?” he asked. He didn’t take his eyes off the view below.

Jane blinked. He had to ask? “Of course! Are you kidding? I’ve been dreaming about it for the past year. I can do outgoing wormholes as well as incoming, I just need to do a few calculations to make sure. But we can go any time.”

Thor smiled and turned to her. “I have something else to ask of you.”

“Sure, what is it?”

“Will you be my wife?”

If Thor had been any other person, Jane would have started looking around for the hidden cameras. But unless Asgard had their own Funniest Home Videos show, this was a serious question.

“I’m sorry, did I hear you right? Be your wife? Like, marry you?” Jane was sure she hadn’t heard that correctly.

“I have done three things every day since returning home from Earth. One was to visit my brother in his cell, whether to try to make him see reason or to simply bid him well and remind him there are those that care for him. One was to study Asgardian history, so that I may learn from not only my mistakes, but those who have come before me as well, so that one day I might rule Asgard as well as my father. And the last was to speak with Heimdall, who would watch over you, and tell me all you were doing in your fight to complete your work.”

“ _All_ I was doing?”

“He respected your privacy, of course,” Thor said. Jane felt a little bit relieved to hear that, at least. She hoped Heimdall was a smart enough guy not to tell Thor about incidents like last night: falling asleep in a drunken stupor on Tony Stark’s couch. “I have never known another like you, Jane. And each day we have been apart, I longed for you more."

“Thor, I care about you. A lot. And I missed you too. But I can’t just marry you, I mean, there’s so much I still don’t even know about you. Like what your favorite color is, or if you prefer baseball or football, not that you probably even know what either of those things are.” Jane was rambling. She took a deep breath. “I didn’t _get_ a window into your life every day.”

Thor nodded. “It was unfair of me to ask.”

Jane knew turning him down was the right thing to do, but she felt awful about it anyway. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Do not be, Jane. Now that I am here, we can become more closely acquainted with one another.” 

She reached up to touch Thor’s cheek; his beard was slightly scratchy. “Sure. I’d like that.” Thor’s arms closed around her, impossibly gentle for the strength she knew he had. Jane slipped both her hands around his neck and tilted her head up towards his. Their eyes locked. Butterflies erupted in her stomach. Their first kiss had been impulsive and hurried; this was slow, and the anticipation was killing her. But she was kind of enjoying it, too. 

Jane closed her eyes, and their lips met. She wasn’t sure who moved first, she or Thor, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the way he was pressed against her, the smell and feel of him filling her senses. She parted her lips and deepened the kiss. Thor gripped her tighter. Jane thought she made some sort of moaning noise - or maybe it was Thor. It didn’t matter. This moment was perfect, this long kiss, framed in the window peering down across New York City while the sun set. Jane thought if she had died in that moment, then it wouldn’t have been too bad.

She _didn’t_ die in that moment. 

But, the world did end.

***

Jane didn’t want to, but she pulled away from Thor. Something was wrong, but she wasn’t sure what. She looked out the window in confusion. Everything was dark outside. There was still some lingering light in the sky from the setting sun, but five minutes ago she had seen numerous squares of light from the windows of the surrounding buildings. Now, there was none.

“Power outage?” she asked aloud, despite knowing Thor wouldn’t know what she was talking about.

Thor followed her gaze. “The city is dark,” he observed. “Yet not here?”

“Stark Tower has an independent power source, an arc reactor.” 

“Like the one in the iron suit?”

“Yeah. But much, much bigger.” Jane went to fetch the tv remote. Tony and Pepper had satellite, so that wasn’t a problem. Surely such a massive power outage in New York City would be on the news pretty quickly. She hit the button on the remote, but nothing happened. Jane clicked it a few more times before giving up and turning on the tv at the source. Static.

 _Must be a local feed,_ she thought, and flipped to another channel. More static. She kept flipping, but none of the channels were airing. She turned off the tv. “Huh.”

“Is something wrong?” Thor asked.

“Kind of,” Jane replied. “Or maybe I’m imagining it.” But something felt very, very off. 

She pulled out her cell phone, to call Tony. But when she tried to activate the screen, nothing happened. She took it apart, pulled out the battery, stuck it back in, and tried turning it on. It wouldn’t start up. The remote, her cell phone. Jane looked at Thor with concern.

“Nothing’s working,” she said.

“You said it was a - power outage?” Jane saw Thor’s eyes dart to where he left Mjolnir by the bar. Her unease was setting him on edge.

“This isn’t a normal power outage. Jarvis?” Jane spoke to the air, knowing the AI would hear her.

“Dr Foster, things are definitely not normal.” Even the computer managed to sound a little alarmed. “All of my lines of outside communication are down. We are entirely cut off.”

“Where’s Tony?”

“He and Miss Potts left half an hour ago, to have dinner.”

“Tell them to come up here as soon as they get back,” Jane said.

“Of course.”

“What are we going to do?” Thor asked. 

“We’re going to the roof. I think something went wrong with the bridge.”

On top of Stark Tower, the darkness of the city was even more apparent. Jane stood near the edge, face buried in a scarf as she peered out into blackness. The moon wasn’t even out, but the sun had all but set by this point. Jane cursed the short days of winter. She could barely see anything, except what Stark Tower itself was illuminating. Jane shivered, whether from the cold or the eeriness of the situation, she didn’t know. 

Thor was standing by her device, and peering down at it, as if he could solve the problem by staring. Jane tore herself away from the view and dropped down to peck at her laptop. The _CONNECTION COMPLETE_ message was still flashing. It was plugged into the arc reactor, thankfully. She dismissed the message and began scanning through the logs. There were some errors that had occurred, but none of them were very important, and certainly none would explain how this caused the power to go out, if it was even the cause.

Jane slammed close the lid of her laptop, frustrated.

“No answers?” Thor asked. He held out a hand and helped her up. 

“No. But, I - I think I did this.” Jane detected a slight edge of panic in her own voice, and she took a deep breath to calm herself down.

“How can you be sure?”

“Well I can’t, but, when I opened the bridge, it created a crazy electrical storm. Maybe it’s connected somehow. I mean, it doesn’t really make sense, but we’re dealing with otherworldly stuff now.”

“We should wait until we have more information before reaching any conclusions,” Thor said. 

Jane nodded. “You’re right. Wait, the radio!”

“Radio?”

“Shortwave radio. If I can pick up a signal on that, it will tell us how widespread this power outage is. C’mon!” Jane ran back inside, with Thor on her heels.

She didn’t have a shortwave radio, but she knew who did. Bruce kept one in his lab; he liked to listen to it on late nights. She’d passed by his door on more than one night when he was burning the midnight oil even later than her. He always sat slightly hunched over, typing away at a computer or writing something in a notebook, the little radio on his table blaring something in a foreign language. 

Jane and Thor arrived at his lab to find it empty. “Jarvis, where’s Bruce?” 

“Dr Banner left Stark Tower this morning. He is travelling abroad to a conference.”

“Thanks.” Jane made a beeline for the radio. She didn’t think he’d mind. She flipped it on.

Nothing happened.

“Shit,” Jane said. Her phone, the remote, the radio. They all ran on batteries. How could battery power go out?

Thor stood on the other side of the table, watching her. His fingers twitched, like he longed to find something tangible he could smash with his hammer. But he said nothing, letting her work. 

Jane turned the radio over. In a compartment on the back was a coiled up plug. She grinned and unfurled it. She found the nearest outlet and plugged it in, then tried the on switch again. Success! The little light on the front of the radio lit up to indicate it had power. Jane tuned into one of Bruce’s preset stations.

But it was static. “Maybe it’s just this station,” she said aloud. She started tuning the dial, moving it slowly across the bands. But there was nothing out there. It took a few minutes but she made a full circuit. Absolutely nothing but static. “I don’t get it,” she finally said, defeated.

“What were you hoping to hear?” Thor asked.

“Something. Anything. This radio picks up signals from all over the world. And there’s nothing out there. _Anywhere._ ” Jane was worried now. Really worried. The static was loud, but lonely sounding. “I’m beginning to think something else is going on. The Einstein-Rosen Bridge... it shouldn’t have this effect. I mean, it _didn’t_. No way. If it was going to go wrong at all, it would have sucked the planet inside out. Not make batteries stop working.”

She turned off the radio and stared into space. “And why is Stark Tower - is it, I mean it has to be - but what’s different -”

“Jane, you are not making any sense.”

“Sorry. The power is down. Apparently everywhere. There’s not even any radio stations broadcasting anymore. My phone’s battery doesn’t work. But somehow Stark Tower is still lit up.”

Thor nodded. “The arc reactor.”

“Exactly. There’s something about it that’s made it immune to whatever the hell is going on. What it is, I don’t know. The arc reactor is a kind of fusion reactor, but that’s nothing special.” Jane shrugged. “This just makes no logical sense.”

“Pardon me, Dr Foster, but Mr Stark and Miss Potts have arrived at Stark Tower,” Jarvis said. “I have directed them to your location.”

“Good, maybe Tony can help with this.” 

They didn’t have to wait long for Tony and Pepper to show up. When they did, they both wore concerned expressions that she was sure mirrored her own. They relayed how they’d been eating dinner at a restaurant four blocks over when the power went out. They’d assumed, like Jane had, it was a normal power outage. But they soon realized their phones didn’t work. And then they tried to take the car back, it wouldn’t turn on. They’d had to walk back to Stark Tower. Their noses and cheeks were still tinged pink from the cold. Jane caught them up with what she’d discovered so far.

“All the batteries are dead. Cars, apparently. Phones, radios. Even the tv remote,” Jane said.

“Except for here,” Pepper chimed in.

Tony nodded. “The arc reactor. I don’t know why that still works. I’d have to know what the hell caused this blackout in the first place.”

“It seems someone wished to darken your world,” Thor said. His words sent a chill down Jane’s spine.

“You think this was intentional?” Jane asked.

“You said yourself this situation made no sense. You can think of no naturally occurring reason?”

Tony snapped his fingers and pointed at Thor. “Big man’s onto something. This has ‘crazy evil mastermind’ written all over it. Thor, you sure something didn’t come through that wormhole with you?”

“Certain. I was alone. There was none other with me when the bridge opened, save for Heimdall. He stayed behind. Besides, he would have no cause to do such a thing to Midgard.”

“Have you ever heard of anything like this before, Thor?” Jane asked.

“I know of no such magic. But that does not mean it does not exist.”

Jane sat heavily on a stool. “What can we do?”

“First thing’s first,” Tony said. “Stark Tower is lit up like a Christmas tree, and once panic sets in everybody’s gonna want in. Jarvis?”

“Sir.”

“Send any employees in the building home. Once they’re gone, initiate the Zombieland Protocol.” 

Jane raised an eyebrow. 

“Zombieland Protocol?” Pepper asked incredulously.

“Well, I didn’t predict a worldwide power outage. The zombie plan is the closest thing I got that fits. It locks and reinforces the doors and windows. Also, it’ll electrify the entire first floor. So, once that’s on, don’t go down there.”

Jane suddenly remembered something. “What if Bruce comes back? He won’t know.”

Tony’s face twitched. “He was on his way to a science conference. Gene-splicing. He wanted to hear the latest advancements.” Tony looked out the window, at the blackness. “He should have been on a plane to Brazil.”

“Oh god, planes. I didn’t even think...” Pepper said. “But he’ll be okay?”

“He’ll be fine. He’s the Hulk.” Tony said.

Jane put her hand over her mouth, horrified. She thought of Bruce waking up in a pile of rubble, the remains of a plane fallen from the sky. Surrounded by bodies...

“All employees have left Stark Tower, sir,” Jarvis said, drawing Jane’s mind away from the terrible imagery. “Enacting Zombieland Protocol now.”

***

It had been two days since the power outage began. 

Jane had started off hoping distantly that it would just turn back on. She’d spent that first night curled up on the couch, listening to Thor - who insisted on sleeping on the floor next to her, despite the availability of another couch - as he breathed. It made her feel better to know he was there. This situation was weird, even weirder than those three days in Puento Antiguo where she’d first met Thor. It made her smile to think that he had become closer to normal. 

She’d tried to use the sound of his deep breaths to lull her mind to sleep, but it wouldn’t stop going a mile a minute. Her brain attempted to come up with explanations for the power outage, how to fix it, and who would do this, if in fact there was someone behind it all. But she had gotten nothing for her troubles but to face the cold, grey morning without the benefit of a night’s restful sleep.

The next day, Tony and Thor had helped Jane drag her Einstein-Rosen Bridge device back inside. She took it apart, found nothing wrong. She spent three hours combing through every inch of the code. There was nothing there. She had all but accepted that this wasn’t anything to do with her, but getting confirmation was a huge relief. Meanwhile, Tony had put on his Iron Man suit and flown off to find Nick Fury at SHIELD, and hopefully get some answers. Thor had helped Pepper take an inventory of all the resources they had at Stark Tower, which were quite a lot. Tony really had prepared for a potential zombie outbreak. When he got back, he just shook his head. SHIELD didn’t know anything more than they did. Or at least, not that they were sharing with Tony Stark.

That night, Jane was able to sleep. But her dreams were filled with all sorts of terrible images. Zombies that lurched through the dark streets of New York, eating people who got in their way. Her device starting up, sending the beam of light into the sky, which then exploded and set fire to the air. Circles of people around her, strangers, friends, pointing their fingers at her and shouting that it was all her fault. Jane woke up from these dreams several times, heart racing. Each time she reached out to Thor on the floor beside her, feeling his solid shoulder under her hand. It reassured her that she was awake, and safe. 

The second day, fires broke out across the city. With the power gone, so was everybody’s sources of heat. The people of New York City were building fires in their tiny apartment living rooms, burning furniture and books. Jane, Thor, Tony, and Pepper stood at the window, looking over the city, watching smoke pour out of dozens of windows. It was impossible to tell which fires were under control, and which ones weren’t. Jarvis told them there was a crowd gathering at the base of Stark Tower. They wanted in. They knew Stark Tower had power - that was an impossible to hide fact. Inside was warmth, a supply of food and water, and protection. It was a powerful draw. When Thor had asked what they could do for the people of New York, it had depressed Jane when the only true answer was _nothing._ What could a couple of superheroes do for millions of people in need? 

The second night, a bullet flew through the window and lodged into the ceiling of the living room. Everyone dove for the floor. Thor covered Jane’s body with his, which she thought was unnecessary, but sweet. Tony put on his suit and investigated, but found nothing. He guessed it had been someone on the ground outside. The bullet had gone through the window at a very high angle due to the distance between the ground and the top floor. There hadn’t been any actual danger of anyone being hit. But the message was clear: New York City was no longer a safe place to be.

They had to leave Stark Tower. 

***

It didn’t take them long to decide where to go. Tony mostly decided for them - he owned several pieces of property across the US (and overseas), but he had one in particular in mind. A farmhouse built in the woods of Maine, no neighbors for miles, and the nearest town - with a population only of about three hundred - was a twenty minute drive away. And since cars were out of commission, it was a much longer walk than that. A perfect place to regroup and reassess, he’d said. After they left, Tony would disconnect the arc reactor powering Stark Tower. The sooner it went dark, the better.

Packing was quick for Jane and Thor. All Thor had was his hammer, and all Jane had was one spare set of clothes, thanks to Pepper’s assistant. She’d been switching off between the two and washing the other every night. Her Einstein-Rosen Bridge device was too large to bring with them, and didn’t serve much of a purpose at the moment. She wouldn’t be presenting any papers on what she’d done while the world was without power. Instead she disassembled it and packed it away into a box, which Thor easily hefted over a shoulder and stowed in a safe, unobtrusive corner in Stark Tower for her. She kept her notebook with herself, though. She had since filled it to capacity, but it contained a full schematic for her device. It was a precious resource she couldn’t lose.

Before she’d taken the device apart, she asked Thor if he wanted to go home before she did. Jane couldn’t bring herself to look at him when she asked, because it wasn’t an offer to go with him. She had to stay on Earth and try to find out what was going on. It would have been goodbye. 

“Jane, look at me,” Thor had said. She turned to him, bracing herself for what he had to say. She knew he had a life and a kingdom and all that stuff to go back to. “Some great evil has afflicted your world. The Avengers are my friends. _Humanity_ are my friends. And when someone or something hurts my friends, they hurt me as well. I will not leave until we have solved this. Together.”

Jane hadn’t expected that. But she’d been hoping for it. She smiled and kissed him quickly on the cheek, then dismantled the culmination of her life’s work.

Tony and Pepper took much longer to get their stuff together. Jane gave Tony back the small arc reactor that had powered her device, and he put it in a suitcase with a half dozen others - all of the smaller arc reactors that Stark Tower had. Some were older prototypes, but he didn’t want anything left behind that could fall into the wrong hands. Pepper filled every piece of luggage or bag she could find, not just with clothes and blankets but also things like food and medical supplies. She filled one small duffle bag entirely with computer hard drives she said had sensitive information on them. She refused to leave them behind, despite the fact that once the arc reactor was disconnected, there would be no way for anyone to access what was on them. _Whatever else,_ Pepper had said fiercely, _I’m still CEO of this company and I have to protect its intellectual property._

When they were finally ready to go, they assembled their stuff on the roof of Stark Tower around lunchtime. It was a dozen or so bags of varying shapes, filled to capacity. Tony groaned about having to make multiple trips while getting into his suit.

“We should probably do human cargo first,” Jane said, referring to herself and Pepper. 

“I agree. It is not safe to leave you behind,” Thor said. His eyes were scanning the horizon of the city for danger. 

They were virtually untouchable up there, thanks to the security protocols still in place at the base of the tower. But there was a crowd of people down at street level at any given time, and eventually, one of them might be smart enough or lucky enough to find a way through or around the safety protocols. Jane felt guilty about leaving behind a city of millions to die from cold and eventual hunger, but she didn’t know what to do. She had no ideas, and she was with a couple of superheroes who didn’t have any either, so at least she wasn’t alone on that.

Tony hooked an arm around Pepper, and she looped her arms around his neck. Thor held out an arm to Jane, and she did her best to wrap her arms tightly around his waist. It didn’t feel like it would be very secure, but she knew Thor would keep a tight hold on her no matter what. 

“Ready?” Tony asked. Thor nodded. “Okay. Follow me.” 

Tony shot up in the air, and Pepper buried her face into his shoulder, as much as the suit would allow anyway. Jane guessed it had more to do with the icy winds that flight caused than anything else. This was going to be a very chilly couple of hours.

“Hold on,” Thor said, and he pointed Mjolnir into the sky with the arm not wrapped around her. They flew upwards, coming even with Tony and Pepper. The two superheroes nodded at each other then set off, Tony first then Thor behind him.

Thor’s grip around Jane was tight, but not painful. She kept her arms around him, but she wanted to watch them fly, so she shifted around slightly until she could look down at the ground screaming by. Her one previous trip with Thor had been very short, and was over before it had begun. It was going to take longer to fly 450 miles than just a few minutes, so she had a chance to really enjoy it.

She thought she should have felt more frightened, being so high in the air. But Jane had tried never to let fear stop her before, and she wouldn’t let it now. She watched the blur of colors below her; mostly browns and snowy whites, the colors of winter. Thor looked at her once to smile reassuringly, and she grinned back. The rush of wind in her ears was loud but welcome, because it made it all the more real. The only downside was all that cold wind in her face. Her eyes kept watering and she couldn’t feel her nose anymore. But it was worth it.

***

By the time they arrived at the farmhouse in the woods, Jane’s teeth were chattering uncontrollably. Pepper was suffering from the same problem, and the two women quickly went inside, where it was marginally warmer. At least it was protected from the cold wind and snow inside. But they needed to warm it up.

Fortunately, there was a pile of firewood next to the woodstove in the living room. Jane made a beeline for it and started to build a fire, while Tony made a crack about not burning the house down, since she never did get that Scouts badge. Thor stood nearby and fetched her lighter fluid and matches when she asked for them, while Pepper and Tony said goodbye.

“Oh god, warmth!” Pepper exclaimed, coming up behind Jane, who was just closing the door on the growing fire in the woodstove. Jane rubbed her hands together and stood up.

Thor stepped back to allow Pepper closer. “I am going to assess the exterior of this building, and the surrounding area,” he said, gripping Mjolnir tightly.

“I’m sure the only threatening thing out there is some bears,” Jane said.

“Nevertheless,” Thor replied. Once outside, Jane heard the telltale rustling of his cape as he flew into the air.

Jane turned to Pepper. “Tony left for New York?”

“Yeah. He’s going to see Nick Fury again while he’s there.” Pepper’s voice held a note of disapproval. 

Jane had plenty of reason to dislike SHIELD, but she wasn’t sure why Pepper didn’t. Pepper had been all too happy to fund Jane’s project after SHIELD shelved it, but Jane had never asked why. “Not a big fan of SHIELD?” she asked.

“They’re meddlers,” Pepper said. “I don’t like meddlers. The only good one of them died.”

“You mean Coulson?” Jane had butted heads with the man, but they’d parted on somewhat amicable terms. She hadn’t been happy to hear that he’d died.

Pepper nodded and shed her jacket, tossing it on nearby chair. Jane followed suit. 

“You know,” Jane said. “He stole my research once.”

Pepper laughed. After a beat, Jane joined in. The two were still giggling when Thor came back.

“All clear?” Jane asked.

“Yes.” Thor set down his hammer next to the door. “I almost wish it had not been.”

Jane walked over to him. “Antsy?”

Thor squared his jaw and looked away from her, but nodded. “It is an old habit, one I have been attempting to break. But it is hard to adjust to sitting still this long.”

Pepper said something about looking for candles, and left the room. Jane heard her rustling around in drawers in another room. 

“C’mon,” Jane said to Thor, leading him to the couch. They sat down, little puffs of dust rising up from the cushions as they did so. “It’s okay to be antsy. I am too. I can’t help feeling like there’s something I could be doing. Something I _should_ be doing.”

“That is one of the things about you that I love, Jane.”

Jane’s breath caught on the word _love,_ but she tried not to let it show. It had been a long time since someone had said that to her, and the last time they had, that relationship had ended badly. But Thor wasn’t Donald. She knew that. Instead, Jane sidled up closer to Thor’s side. He put an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. He was putting off more heat than the fireplace, even through all that armor, and soon Jane felt warm again. 

***

By the time Tony got back, about an hour after sunset, Pepper had managed to locate two boxes of emergency candles. They wanted to conserve what they had, though, so they’d lit only one, and stuck it in a dusty old brass candlestick that had been sitting on a shelf. It didn’t throw off much light, but the fireplace was providing some anyway. The pantry was completely empty - obviously nobody had been here in years, and the place was not kept stocked - but Pepper had found a deck of cards. She and Jane were teaching Thor how to play Go Fish when Tony burst through the door, arms loaded with bags. There were several threaded over each of his arms, and he was holding more. He dumped them unceremoniously on the floor, shut the front door, and flipped up his mask.

“Got em all in one trip,” he said satisfactorily. “You’re welcome.”

“Thank God, I’m starving.” Pepper hopped up to root through the bags, looking for whichever one held the food.

“We should hit that nearby town tomorrow,” Tony was saying. “Buy whatever’s left. If anything’s left.”

There was something about the tone of his voice that unsettled Jane. Pepper heard it too. She stopped and stood up, staring at him. “Did you talk to Fury?” she asked.

“SHIELD’s got no idea what happened. None at all. And they’re not optimistic about the power coming back. They wanted me to stay in New York, be kind of a peacekeeper. Things are gonna get bad now.”

“Get bad?” Thor asked. “How?”

“We don’t grow our own food here,” Jane said numbly. “Most people don’t, anyway. We mass produce it. Without electricity, there’s no food being canned and frozen. No trucks to transport food into populated areas. There’s no way to get food into the stores.”

“Store shelves are already empty across New York,” Tony said. He took off his helmet and ran a hand through his hair. “Things went pear-shaped pretty early on. People know this isn’t a normal kind of power outage. I saw a riot on 10th Street on my way out of town. I managed to disperse the crowd, but things like that are going to be happening every day.”

“What did you tell Fury?” Pepper asked.

“I told Fury hell no. If the power doesn’t come back - and it doesn’t look like it is any time soon - things are gonna get worse before they get better. SHIELD has a lot of agents, but not that many. And some have already defected. We can’t possibly hope to police the country. And I’m not going to use the suit against scared and dying people. To top it off, they wanted the arc reactor powering Stark Tower. They wanted me to convert it to power SHIELD headquarters.”

Pepper scoffed. “I hope you told them to f-”

“Oh, I did. And _then some_ ,” Tony cut in.

“Why would this be a problem?” Thor asked.

“It would be a huge imbalance,” Tony said. “I don’t entirely distrust SHIELD, but I don’t entirely trust them, either. Nick Fury isn’t a bad man, but he’s just one man. And I know all of SHIELD doesn’t feel the way he does.”

“So what do we do now?” Jane asked.

“Survive,” Tony replied.

***

That night, the four of them ate soup for dinner, and then they dragged blankets from the beds in the upstairs bedrooms and camped out in front of the fireplace. The upstairs rooms were all still frigidly cold. It would take a while for the heat to penetrate through the whole house and chase off the cold.

Pepper and Tony were curled around each other, and fell asleep quickly. At least, their breathing evened out quickly. They might not have been asleep, but they weren’t talking. Jane was having a hard time falling asleep. (That was apparently becoming a pattern.) She was wrapped in her own blanket, but Thor was laying on the floor near her. She rolled to her side to face him. His eyes were closed.

Thor’s features were strong to begin with, but the harsh light of the fire made them even sharper. He looked so much older, despite that from his perspective, about only a few seconds of time had passed. A year was nothing to him. But Jane could see the difference, regardless.

He’d said he loved her. Did he mean it? Thor didn’t say things he didn’t mean, she was sure of that. But did the word hold the same weight on Asgard as it did here? Thor’s people lived so long; maybe the word lost its meaning after a while.

Jane shook her head and tried to clear out those thoughts. It wasn’t really helpful to be thinking about that right now. Instead she mused on the worldwide situation. She thought of all the people lying in cold rooms, freezing to death tonight. People who were quickly running out of food, and had nowhere to go to get more. Would the National Guard roll into action? What could they do without resources or vehicles of their own? She certainly hadn’t seen any sign of them in the three days they were in New York after the power went out. Tony was right, things were going to get much worse on planet Earth from here on out. Jane considered offering to send Thor back to Asgard again - it would be easy to fetch her device and reassemble it again. 

“Stop thinking so loudly,” Thor mumbled.

“What?” Jane whispered, not wanting to wake Pepper and Tony, three feet away.

Thor opened his eyes and turned on his side to face her. “I can feel your mind racing from here.” He also spoke quietly in deference to their sleeping roommates.

Jane smiled self-deprecatingly. “Sorry.”

“It is a problem that commonly afflicts the clever,” Thor said. 

“Since you’re awake anyway, mind if I bounce an idea off you?”

“Go ahead.”

A new idea had popped into her head off the tangent of offering Thor a trip home. “What are the other realms like? Is there any place for humans to go?”

“You speak of evacuation?”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

“How many humans reside on Midgard now?” Thor asked. 

“Uh.. about 7 billion,” Jane said sheepishly. As soon as she said it, she knew it was a dead end.

“There are some realms that might be suitable for humans, and may be willing to take in some. But-”

“Yeah, not everybody. Not even close to everybody.” 

“It was a noble idea,” Thor offered.

“I guess humanity can’t be saved by gods and magic. Whatever this is, it’s our problem to fix.”

Thor looked at her, his face awash in such genuine sympathy - she knew how much he liked Earth - that it hurt her heart to look at him. She hated to see reflected in his eyes the hopelessness she felt for what was happening. 

Jane didn’t want to see that anymore. She could have just rolled over, but instead she was taken with the impulse to erase that look from Thor’s face herself. She crawled out from under her blanket and pushed Thor onto his back. She was sure he could have easily resisted her average-human-strength shove on his shoulder, but he humored her. Jane straddled him, and she was pleased to see surprise had replaced the former look of sorrow and pity.

“Jane? What are you-” 

“Shh,” she said, and leaned down to kiss him. 

They kissed slowly at first, but it quickly heated up, growing more impassioned. Jane felt his hands come to rest on her hips, before moving slowly down her legs. She was wearing jeans, but it felt nice anyway, and lust coursed through her. 

Jane pulled back and glanced over at Tony and Pepper. They were either still asleep, or pretending to be. “We should go upstairs, to one of the bedrooms. It’s cold up there, but it won’t stay that way for long.” She grinned salaciously.

Thor sighed, and slid Jane off of him. She landed on her backside with a quiet thump. “No,” he said.

No? The man who just earlier that day had used the word _love_ when referring to his feelings for her, was turning down her sexual advances? She was so surprised by the rejection, she didn’t even know what to say. “Oh,” was all she could come up with.

“You’re grieving,” Thor said. “You need to heal, and that is not the way.”

Who was he to say that wasn’t the way? Anger flared in her. “What are you, my shrink now?”

Thor’s eyebrows twitched, not understanding the reference, but he pressed on. “Down that path lies self-destruction.”

Jane thought that was a little melodramatic, but her anger flowed out of her as quickly as it had come. In any case, it wasn’t fair to Thor. She shouldn’t use him that way. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about him - she did. And now that she’d officially doubled the amount of time spent with him, she was sure she cared about him even more than she had after those first whirlwind three days. But he deserved better.

“Sorry,” was all she managed to say. She crawled back under her blanket and faced away from Thor. She could feel his eyes on her back, but she could think of nothing else to say, and embarrassment was creeping in. 

Things were gonna be awkward tomorrow.

***

The next day, Jane didn’t even see Thor for hours. He’d changed into some of Tony’s clothes and gone to town with Pepper before Jane even woke up, in an attempt to procure any sort of additional supplies. Tony stayed back, since his face was so famous, and they didn’t want anyone to know he was in the area, if possible. Or at least, that’s what Tony told her. She half thought that the real reason was Thor had wanted to get away for a while. Get away from _her._

After she woke up and he brought her up to speed, Tony went outside to take stock of the firewood cache and fell a couple trees for more, while Jane stayed inside and sorted through the bags of stuff they’d brought with them from New York. All the while, she kicked herself for having acted so foolishly the night before. How should she fix it? Bring the subject up with him in broad daylight and talk it out? Ignore it and hope the weirdness goes away? Jane wished Darcy was there. She would have known what to do.

Darcy. 

Jane dropped down into a chair and felt the sting of tears in her eyes. So many people out there she cared about, and she didn’t know how they were doing. Darcy, Erik, Bruce. Were they cold? Hungry?

Dead?

A sob escaped her suddenly, and Jane clamped a hand over her mouth. She didn’t want Tony to hear and come running inside, thinking something was wrong, when in fact it was just Jane wallowing. But the tears came, and she let them run down her face, hiccuping every now and again. Her stomach felt like there was a hot ball of lead in it, and she swallowed roughly. She hated crying, but it gave her strength, too. She was gonna figure this out. She had to.

Jane was busily trying to scrub the tears off her face when Tony walked in, clad in the Iron Man suit. He flipped up the facemask. “What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. I’m over it.” Her tone left no room for argument.

“Well I got something that’ll make you feel better,” he said. 

Jane looked at him quizzically as he shed the suit, then propped it up against a wall. He dug out the bag of arc reactors, which Jane hadn’t gotten around to yet, and fished one out. He kneeled next to the wall where the suit was, ran his fingers along the wood, found what he was looking for, and pressed. A panel popped open, and he swung it wide to reveal a small, darkened computer screen, keyboard, and a bank of wires running through the wall.

Jane wanted to ask what he was doing, but elected to just wait and be surprised instead. She watched as Tony ripped certain wires out, and connected them to the arc reactor. Then he powered it on. There was the slightest humming sound that came from the reactor, but it was nice to hear that buzz of electricity again. It was so quiet without it. The computer screen came to life. Tony then used more wiring to interface with his suit, and tapped away at the keyboard. He started up some sort of program, but Jane was too far away to read any of the text on the screen so she didn’t know what it was.

“Wait for it...” Tony said, holding a finger in the air.

“Transfer complete, sir,” Jarvis’ soft tones emanated from all around them.

Jane stood up and smiled. “Jarvis!”

“Good to hear your voice again, Dr Foster.”

“I backed him up to the suit before shutting down Stark Tower. I make sure to keep all my spare properties Stark tech compliant.” Tony patted the arc reactor. “Easy.”

Jane glanced at the nearest lamp. “So does this mean... we have electricity now?”

“Ah, no, not really.” Tony grimaced. “I never changed over the house’s original electrical system. The reactor is only powering the computer holding Jarvis, and a series of hidden speakers and cameras throughout the house, which are on their own network.”

“It probably wouldn’t be a good idea anyway,” Jane said, thinking of the bullet through the window in Stark Tower.

Tony disconnected his suit, then shoved the arc reactor into the panel and slammed it shut. “Yeah. Having power would make us stand out.”

Tony took the bag with the rest of the reactors and disappeared with them. _Probably to bury them like a bone in the backyard,_ Jane thought, but then reasoned that probably wasn’t a bad idea.

She picked up her one sad little bag and went to check out the bedrooms upstairs. There were four, one large master bedroom and three smaller ones. The large one had already been staked out. Pepper and Tony’s clothes were strewn all over the bed. Jane thought that was fair enough; it was Tony’s house after all. 

In a bedroom that was on the opposite corner of the house to the master bedroom, she found Thor’s usual outfit folded carefully onto the bed. He must have decided on that one. That left her with two choices. The bedroom next to Pepper and Tony’s, or the one next to Thor’s. The one next to Pepper and Tony’s was the smallest, and it also probably meant if they had sex she’d have to hear it since they shared a wall. Jane cringed guiltily at her actions last night.

The choice was easy. She went into the room next to Thor’s and looked around. Light yellow striped wallpaper and a wooden floor painted dark brown. A queen size bed dominated most of the space, with a small dresser in the corner. There was a mirror above the dresser, but it had a thick coating of dust on it and Jane could barely see herself in it. That suited her fine. Jane tossed her bag on top of the dresser and flopped down onto the bed. It was stripped bare from last night, but it was comfortable. It was warmer up here now; there was an upstairs fireplace in the hall that someone had built a roaring fire in that morning. 

Jane curled up around herself and looked out of one of the two windows in the room. From her vantage point on the bed, she could see only a patch of blue-grey sky and a few branches of a leafless tree, coated with a layer of snow. She heard the distant crackling of the woodfire and the occasional thumps from Tony moving around downstairs. It felt peaceful, and she slipped into a dreamless sleep, her first in a while.

***

Jane awoke to find a plastic bag on top of the dresser that hadn’t been there before. She stretched and felt bones popping. It was nice to sleep on a bed again. It had been almost week since she’d slept in hers.

Hah. A week. Hard to believe that it had only been that long since things were normal. It already felt like longer. 

Jane got up and rooted through the bag. There was some more clothes, a box of tampons - _bless Pepper Potts_ , Jane said to herself - a hair brush, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and deodorant. It wasn’t much, but it would last until they figured out what to do next. If the power never came back, she guessed they’d all eventually have to revert to living like old west settlers. The idea didn’t particularly bother her, but she didn’t know what she’d do without computers.

She left her room to find the others, but stopped in Thor’s doorway as she passed it. Thor was inside. He was still wearing Tony’s clothes, and the shirt he was wearing was almost comically tight on him; every muscle in his chest and arms was outlined. Although she appreciated the view, that wasn’t why Jane stopped. Thor was sitting on his bed, looking at something in his hands. But she couldn’t see what. 

Jane knocked on the doorframe. “Thor?”

Thor looked up and smiled. “You are awake.”

“Yeah, sorry. Seems like I keep sleeping and missing all the important stuff.”

“Can we talk?” Thor asked.

Jane stiffened. Conversations never went well that started with that question. But she nodded.

“Sit with me,” Thor said, and he stuck whatever was in his hands behind his back on the bed. 

Jane sat down next to him. “I’m sorry about last night,” she said. Better to just get it out of the way. “You were right.”

Thor visibly relaxed. “I thought you were upset with me.”

“What? No. I’m upset at myself.”

“You have no need to be,” Thor assured her.

“We all make mistakes?” Jane grinned.

“Indeed. Here.” Thor reached behind his back and pulled the thing he’d been hiding out. “This is for you.”

Jane took the item from Thor, and once she had it in her hands she could see what it was. A notebook. It was leather-bound, black, and had a snap closure. Jane opened it and flipped through the blank pages. Unlined. Perfect.

“I noticed your old one was full of writing,” Thor said.

“This is wonderful, Thor,” Jane said. She snapped it back shut, enjoying the sharp sound of it. “Thank you.”

She barely had the words out of her mouth before Thor moved in for a kiss. It was more chaste than the previous night’s, a slow and soft kiss, but Thor’s hand came to rest at the back of Jane’s neck, and she felt her heart race from the contact. They pulled apart and Jane smiled.

“I’m gonna - gonna go put this somewhere safe,” Jane said, and got to her feet. Before she could leave, Thor grabbed her hand.

“I did not want to turn you down last night, Jane,” he said. His deep voice carried through her arm, into her chest, and down her spine, making her shiver. “Next time, I might not possess the same measure of strength.”

It sounded like a promise. Jane squeezed his hand before leaving, her heart in her throat.

***

They settled into an easy rhythm for a while. Tony and Thor took turns doing the physical stuff like gathering firewood, doing perimeter checks, and hauling water from a nearby creek. They needed to boil it before they could drink it, and if anybody wanted a bath then buckets of it would need to be heated on the stove and dumped into the tub. 

Pepper took on the household tasks with an amazing zeal. She kept detailed notes of inventories, regularly made trips into town to barter and trade with the townspeople (they didn’t have much to trade, but Pepper had a lot of jewelry and a pair of gold and diamond earrings buys a lot of fresh baked bread), and took over most meal preparation so she could control how much of their food was being used. Jane could easily see how her command of logistics and resource management made her a good CEO.

All in all it left Jane with little to do. She helped with minor household tasks like cleaning and laundry, but she often spent most of her days curled up in a chair with her new notebook, writing down thoughts and theories about the electrical problem. She was constantly puzzled over the issue of how something could affect both power plants and AA batteries. And what also didn’t affect arc reactors. It was a logic puzzle, one she could feasibly be working on for a very long time. But considering how long her last puzzle had taken to figure out, she knew she had the patience for it.

Things between her and Thor were going well, she thought. They spent many nights sitting together on the couch after Tony and Pepper went to sleep. Sometimes they played cards, and often they just talked. Jane told Thor her entire life story, it seemed, piecemeal across their conversations. She didn’t usually talk about herself so much, but Thor kept asking questions, so she answered them. Jane asked Thor questions too, and she was treated to a few unbelievable-sounding stories of his exploits in his youth. Tales of monsters and magic, and defeating otherworldly enemies in battle. The animated nature of his retellings served to convince her of their authenticity. Once she asked him to describe Asgard to her in detail, and it sounded so beautiful - golden towers, rivers that flowed off the sides of cliffs and into space, a dense, starry night sky with visible nebulae - that Jane wistfully wondered to herself why they weren’t there right now. 

It would have been all too easy. And that was exactly the problem with it: it was too easy. Running away was not Jane Foster’s style. 

***

Jane could have guessed that the the easy routine they’d fallen into would have been shaken up sooner or later. Of course it was sooner - it was always sooner. 

Everyone was in bed but her. Pepper and Tony had gone up hours ago. Thor had lingered for a while, but Jane was in a contemplative mood, so eventually he left her to scribble in her notebook by candlelight. She had been lost in her thoughts for at least an hour when she heard it - the _click_ of the backdoor, in the kitchen, closing softly.

Jane stilled her writing hand, mid-word. She couldn’t see into the kitchen from where she sat in the living room. It was an old style farmhouse, and there was a door between the living room and kitchen, which was half closed. Jane quickly blew out the candle. Her goal had been to shroud the room in darkness, but the moon was out, and it was bright. After a second her eyes adjusted and she could see the room clearly. She strained her ears, listening for another sound, but her heart was beating so loudly she couldn’t pick out any other noises.

Carefully, her eyes on the door, she closed her notebook and set it aside, then got up from the chair as quietly as she could. The chair squeaked traitorously, and she swore to herself. Her eyes flew to the darkness behind the kitchen door, but she couldn’t see anything.

A quiet, but ominous sounding voice emanated from the darkness. “Don’t move, missy.”

Jane froze. A second later a man appeared in the doorway. He was a big guy - not as big as Thor, but for a human, he was big, at least 6 feet tall. He had a beer belly but she could tell he was muscular too. His arms were covered in tattoos, and in his hand he held a revolver. And it was pointed right at her.

“What do you want?” She said, forcing herself to speak in a normal tone of voice, hoping it might carry upstairs. She could yell for Thor, and he would be pretty fast, but not faster than a bullet. She didn’t want to risk it.

“Your food. I know you got a bunch,” the man said. “You got a few people living here. I seen ‘em in town.”

“They’re asleep,” Jane said.

“I thought you all would be. You’re up late.” The man sounded annoyed.

“Insomniac.” Jane almost shrugged but was wary of doing any sudden movements around the intruder, in case he had a twitchy trigger finger. “Look, just go take some food. It’s fine. Nobody needs to be hurt over this. It’s all in the kitchen.”

The man narrowed his eyes but thought it over. He stepped back from the doorway, and waved the gun at the kitchen. “You help me. I can’t leave you alone.”

Jane nodded and walked into the kitchen, scooting as quickly as she could when she walked by the man. He stunk of grain alcohol and stale tobacco. The kitchen was darker than the living room, but there was enough light to pick out the familiar shapes. She saw some bags sitting on the kitchen table, brought there by the intruder. 

“Fill up the bags,” he ordered gruffly. 

Jane picked one up and went to the pantry and started removing cans from their ever-dwindling cache. _It doesn’t matter,_ she told herself. _There’s plenty of deer in these woods. And bear, if we have to. I’ve never eaten bear, but if you’re starving, I bet it tastes great._

There was a telltale creak in the floorboards from upstairs. Jane almost didn’t hear it, and a quick glance at the gunman told her he didn’t hear it at all. He was too busy watching her carefully, as if she was going to take one of the cans and hurl it at his head. Not a bad idea, she thought wistfully, though the gun kept her from trying it. 

She didn’t know who was moving around up there, but she hoped they were aware of what was going on. They would find a way to survive without the food, but Jane was irritated at how easily he had waltzed in here and how he would get away scot free. 

“Hurry up,” the man said. Jane had slowed down a bit, hoping whoever was up there would come down. But after the initial creak of floorboards she didn’t hear anything else.

“I’m almost done,” Jane said. She finished loading the last bag with just about everything they had, and set it on the table. “Take it and go.” While looking at him, she thought she saw a shadow pass by the window. Jane blinked involuntarily, but gave no other indication she saw it.

The man hefted the bags onto one arm, leaving his gun arm free. They were heavy, but he didn’t seem too troubled. She wondered who it was outside and why they were taking too long. Jane thought maybe they were waiting for him to get outside. She tried to speed things along. 

“You can go now!” Jane said sharply. “Get out!”

But he lingered, his eyes doing a once-over on Jane. “There are other hungers a man has besides just food,” he said to her, and raised the gun more pointedly.

Jane’s blood chilled at the implication. “You said you wanted food, and you have it. But that’s all you’re getting, creep.”

The man grinned. He was framed by a kitchen window, and Jane suddenly saw a human-shaped figure behind him outside, a figure which emanated with blue light. Blue like an arc reactor. Jane dropped to the floor and heard the sound of the Iron Man suit’s repulsors firing, glass breaking, and the scream of the intruder as he was hit square in the back. He fell to the floor and began firing his gun wildly. Jane heard a bullet strike the wall behind her head. She scrambled away, seeking refuge, but the man was in the way of both exits, so she hid as best she could behind a chair. 

“Jane!” came Thor’s shout from inside the house.

“Down here!” she shouted back.

Thor burst into the kitchen, wearing his sleeping clothes, but with his hammer in his hand. The man swung his gun arm around and fired two shots in Thor’s direction. Jane screamed his name, but the gunman missed. Thor swung the hammer into the man and sent him sailing through the window, outside into the snow. Thor ran out after him. 

Jane went to the window, forgetting she was barefoot but ignoring the pain of stepping on broken glass. The intruder was on the ground. She couldn’t tell if he was alive, but Thor and Tony stood over him, so if he was, he wasn’t a threat anymore. Thor had spied the gun near the intruder where it had fallen from his hand, and he brought Mjolnir down on it, crushing it. 

“Jane? Oh my god.” Pepper was downstairs now, the commotion having roused her. She stared at Jane from the doorway.

“Someone broke in to steal our food. It’s okay, the guys have got him.” Jane pointed out the window. 

“No, you’re hurt,” Pepper said. 

Her tone of voice made Jane look down at her feet, which she had cut on the glass. “It’s just-” she cut herself off when she noticed the large red stain on her thigh surrounding a small dark hole in her jeans. The red stain was growing larger as she looked at it. “Oh, shit.”

Pepper rushed over to Jane and helped her into the living room, laying her down on the couch. “Don’t move. We have to stop the bleeding, or something. Right? I don’t know, I don’t know medical stuff. You’d think with Tony I’d have more experience but he always takes care of himself. By the time I get there all I need to do is slap on bandages.”

Pepper was babbling, and seemed far more frightened than Jane felt. But Jane was starting to feel a little light headed, now that the adrenaline was wearing off. Pepper ran off then came back with a towel, pressing it into Jane’s leg. She felt the first inkling of pain from that, sharp pain that drilled through her leg like a hot poker. Jane cried out.

Thor ran into the house. When he saw Jane, he dropped Mjolnir and went to her side. “Jane!”

“She was shot,” Pepper said, her hands pressing down on the towel, which was starting to turn red. Jane could see her own blood on Pepper’s hands. She wanted to throw up. 

“I am sorry,” Thor said. “If I had been quicker...”

“It’s not your fault, Thor,” Jane put her hand on his arm. “What happened to the guy who broke in?”

“Stark is taking care of him.” Thor’s eyes flashed. Jane didn’t know what _taking care of_ meant exactly, but she didn’t want to ask. She didn’t necessarily want the man dead, but she wouldn’t shed a tear over it either. 

“We need a doctor,” Pepper said. Her voice had a tremble to it which unsettled Jane more than anything. 

“There is one in the town. I will take her now.” 

Thor waited for Pepper to hurriedly tie the towel around Jane’s leg as best as she could, then he picked Jane up. He had to shift her around so he could support her with one hand. The other reached out, and Mjolnir flew into it. She groaned at the movement, but she couldn’t even articulate the pain she felt very well. She was so tired...

“Stay with me,” Thor said softly. Jane nodded and fisted her hand into his t-shirt.

Pepper opened the front door and Thor stepped out. It was cold, but Jane didn’t feel it very much. She let her eyes unfocus and gaze over the scenery. The snow-covered pine trees looked so lovely this time of year.

They took off into the air. The town wasn’t far, so they weren’t there long. But Jane was glad for the short trip. The icy wind cut through her thin layers of clothing and kept her awake and alert. Thor landed right in front of a small house with a hand-painted sign out front that read _Doctor Hoyt, Family Practice_. Thor kicked in the front door and shouted for the doctor. 

A small, balding man who looked to be in his 60s, came rushing down the stairs holding a candle. “Gracious!” he said when he saw Jane, and the bloody towel wrapped around her leg. He pointed to a room at the bottom of the stairs. “Get her in here.”

The room was an examination room. There was a standard doctor’s table in the center of the room, and Thor laid Jane down on it gently. “Help her,” Thor pleaded. 

Jane reached out and took Thor’s hand in her own. “It’ll be okay,” she said. He seemed to need the comforting more than she did. 

The doctor untied the towel and cursed under his breath. “Shot, eh? This won’t be easy,” he said. He rummaged around in his cabinets, collecting tools. He turned to Thor. “Son, there’s a hand pump out back of the house. Collect a bucket of water and boil it on the stove in the kitchen. You might have to build up the fire some.” Thor nodded and left the room.

While waiting for Thor to return, the doctor took a pair of scissors and cut off Jane’s jeans to allow access to the wound. Jane groaned.

“Did I hurt ya?” he asked kindly. He had an accent that Jane found comforting. Kind of like a Boston accent, but softer around the edges. 

“No, it’s just, I only have three pairs of jeans, and these were my favorite,” Jane said, and laughed. The laugh quickly turned into a moan, though, as pain overtook her humor.

The doctor smiled and patted her shoulder. “That’s the attitude. I’ll say you’re lucky, though. It’s obvious the bullet didn’t hit an artery. Or you’d probably be dead already.”

“Comforting, doc, thanks,” Jane said. She brought up a hand and wiped at her brow, which was growing quite sweaty.

The doctor packed gauze on her wound while they waited for the water. Eventually Thor came back, bearing a steaming metal bucket. The doctor got to work with very little dialogue, dumping tools into the water, giving the occasional instruction to Thor, and then eventually putting a piece of leather in Jane’s mouth and telling her to bite hard. 

First he cut around the wound with a scalpel, and that hurt, but it didn’t overpower the pain deep in her leg so Jane thought she could take it. But when he started digging around with a pair of tweezers, searching for the bullet, Jane screamed and twisted violently on the table. The doctor shouted at Thor to hold her down. Thor’s hands pressed on her shoulders, providing little comfort, but it gave her something else to focus on. She reached up to grip at his arms, her fingernails scratching at his skin. The little wounds she made healed instantly and she was irrationally jealous. Another wave of intense pain hit as the doctor dug out the bullet from her leg, then everything faded as she passed out. 

***

The first thing Jane was cognizant of was sunlight boring into her eyelids. It seemed brighter than usual. So bright, in fact, it hurt her eyes. 

The second thing she became aware of was the fact that the light wasn’t sunlight, it was a candle being intensified by a magnifying lens, and that her eye was in fact being held open by someone. 

“Oh good, you’re awake,” came that same accent from last night. 

The light left her eyes and Jane blinked, coming into awareness. She was lying on a bed in a bedroom - not hers, she knew that much - and there was pale early morning light coming through the window. There was nobody there but her and the doctor.

“Your man is downstairs. I told him he’s not allowed to see you until you’re awake.” The doctor got out a stethoscope and listened to her chest, telling her to breathe in and out.

Jane was sure she would have blushed at _’your man’_ if her body had had the blood to spare. It took all her effort just to take deep breaths on command. “I’m surprised he went along with that. He’s headstrong.”

“Headstrong? Well that’s putting it lightly.” The doctor laughed. “But I’ve got years of experience dealing with people in pain. And I don’t just mean the ones with the injuries, but the loved ones, too. I told him the best way he could help you was to let you rest. And also to make you some soup. I wasn’t sure if an alien knew how to make soup, but, he was doing okay when I left him.”

“You know who he is?” Jane asked, surprised.

“When that man walked into town two weeks ago, there wasn’t a person who saw him who didn’t know who he was. We may be a tiny town in the ass end of nowhere, but we do get cable news channels. Or we did, before the power went out.” He smiled. “Your other friends are here, too. Now, that was the real surprise - Tony Stark bursting into my front door, demanding to see my patient, without so much as a by-your-leave.” 

Jane grinned at that image.

“Your friends care about you. Specially the big one.” The doctor reached into a pocket and pulled out a small vial of pills. “It’s about time for another one of these. Got you to swallow one last night, while you were passed out. It’s gonna be wearing off soon.”

“What is it?” Jane asked. It was then she realized that the pain in her leg wasn’t that strong, and if she didn’t think about it too hard, she almost could ignore it.

“Morphine pills. Only vial I got.” He popped open the lid and took out one pill, setting it on the night stand. “At first I thought about hoardin’ them, you know, save them for a real rainy day. But they’re gonna expire eventually. Best to use them now for people who really need them.”

Jane nodded, and picked up the pill. The doctor poured her a small cup of water, and she carefully swallowed the pill and drank all the water. He refilled the cup and left it on the night stand. 

“Can I see Thor?” Jane asked.

“Course. Your other friends are gonna have to wait. You can’t get too excitable right now. You’re gonna need lots of rest to heal.”

Soon after the doctor left, she heard Thor coming up the stairs, two at a time. But he entered the room quietly, and kept his voice low. Jane guessed the doctor had scolded him to be quiet around her. She felt affection flare in her chest.

“Jane,” was all he said. He sat down in the seat the doctor had been in a few minutes before. Thor took her hand in his and squeezed it gingerly.

“Hey,” she said. She smiled at him to let him know she was okay. 

They sat in silence. The morphine was starting to hit Jane’s system, and she felt more and more like she was floating on a cloud, tethered only by Thor’s grip on her hand. “Don’t let go,” she said.

“What?” Thor asked.

“Don’t let go, or I’ll float away.” Her voice was dreamy with the morphine. She tried to squeeze his hand but she had no strength.

“Sleep, Jane,” Thor said. He brushed her hair away from her forehead. 

She wanted to stay awake. There were things she needed to tell Thor. Things he should know in case anything ever happened to her. Like how to reassemble the Einstein-Rosen Bridge device so he could get home. And that she loved him.

She loved him? _That’s the morphine talking,_ one tiny, reserved part of her brain reasoned. The rest of her brain, loosened from said morphine, told that part to shut up, because it was true.

Jane loved Thor.

Her eyes closed, and she tried to say it to him, to make sure he knew. _I love you._ She heard the words in her head, but she wasn’t sure if they came out of her mouth too. She wanted to open her eyes and see if Thor had heard, but sleep overtook her.

***

The next time she awoke, it was dark again. She felt clear headed, but her leg also hurt like a bitch. Thor was in the room, staring out the window. It was dark, but the moon was out again, and the bright light reflecting off the white snow outside lit up the inside of the room. She could see Thor’s profile in stark relief. She mused that she wouldn’t be sad to wake up to that every day.

Jane tried to speak, but her mouth was dry and cottony, her throat sticky with sleep and lack of water. But Thor heard her, and came to her bedside. He grabbed the water next to her bed and held it to her lips. She drank slowly. It hurt a little to swallow, and she didn’t want to choke on the water. What a stupid way to go that would be.

Eventually Thor pulled the cup away and Jane let her head drop back onto the pillow. 

“The doctor left this,” he pointed at the night stand. There was a small white pill there, another morphine pill. “He said to take it if you needed to.”

Jane closed her eyes and assessed her pain level. It was pretty high, but she was also enjoying the fact that she felt solid again. “I’m okay for now. I’m tired of being asleep.”

“The doctor also said you had to eat if you can.”

Jane grimaced. Food sounded wholly unappetizing. But it was a struggle to get herself to eat well even when she was perfectly healthy. She knew Thor was right. She nodded. He left to get her food, and while he was gone, Jane heard voices floating up from downstairs. She recognized Tony and Pepper’s voices, along with the doctor’s, and somebody else’s she didn’t recognize. The voices were raised, though not quite shouting. She tried to make out what they were saying, but she couldn’t focus well enough.

Thor returned before long, with a bowl of hot soup. He closed the door behind him, cutting off the voices.

“Who’s down there?” Jane asked.

“It does not matter,” Thor said, setting down the bowl. 

“Thor.” She leveled a look at him, the best she could muster under the circumstances.

Thor sighed. “The town knows now that Iron Man is here. They want assurances of safety from men such as the one that shot you.”

“Oh,” Jane said.

“But the town says that if Stark is unwilling to provide it, then we must all leave. They say if we are not their protectors, then we are liabilities.”

Jane raised an eyebrow, but she couldn’t say anything because Thor was holding a spoonful of soup in front of her mouth and demanding she open up. She drank the spoonful of mostly broth, and her stomach growled appreciatively. That first spoonful awakened her hunger, and she found she could eat half the bowl, which Thor fed to her carefully, spoonful by spoonful. Jane felt a bit silly being hand fed, but the one time she’d tried to take the spoon from him she’d barely gotten her arm into the air before all the strength washed out of it, and her arm dropped back to the bed.

Jesus, getting shot was a pain in the ass.

Once she’d had enough, Thor set the bowl aside. “What are we gonna do?” Jane asked. “About the town’s demands?”

“We will have to cooperate, at least for now. The doctor says you can not be moved for a long time.”

“We should just stay. I like it here anyway,” Jane said. “That man was desperate, but there’s going to be people like him no matter where we go.”

“There is truth in what you say.” 

Jane’s leg was starting to throb angrily. She closed her eyes against the pain. “Can I have that pill now?”

Thor helped her take it. Before she could fall asleep again, she asked Thor to bring her notebook from the house. He said he would only when the doctor said she was strong enough.

“Traitor,” she said teasingly, before dropping off.

***

Jane spent a week in that bed in the doctor’s house. Eventually the doctor let Tony and Pepper come in, and they were their normal bickering selves, which comforted Jane. They told her about cleaning up the mess at the house, and how the town said they would trade food for Iron Man’s protection. Pepper said it would be wrong to take food for that, but Tony disagreed, saying if he had to spend time patrolling the town in his suit, that was time he couldn’t use to hunt up deer. Pepper pointed out that with the suit tech, it took him about five minutes to locate and kill a deer. It was obvious from the way they spoke to each other it was an argument they’d been having daily since the problem arose. 

The topic turned to Jane’s recovery, and how quiet it was without Jane and Thor there, since Thor hadn’t left her bedside since she’d arrived. Eventually Tony told a joke that made Jane laugh too hard, which turned into a coughing fit, and Thor ordered them out. Tony called Thor a mother hen, but they left, promising to return soon. 

“You really haven’t left since I got here?” Jane asked.

Thor’s mood turned serious. “I will never leave your side again, Jane.”

“Thor, sometimes bad things just happen. You can’t be my bodyguard forever.”

“I can try,” he said firmly. 

Jane shook her head in exasperation. The movement sent a jolt of pain into her leg, but it wasn’t strong. She hadn’t had to take a pill for a few days, and she was starting to go a little stir crazy, which she took as a good sign. Jane put her hand over her leg and felt where the wound was through the blanket. Once when the doctor had been in to change the dressing, she’d gotten a good look. He’d sewed her leg up as neatly as he could, but he had apologized and said he wasn’t a plastic surgeon. She was going to have a scar. Jane couldn’t work up the energy to care.

It was another week before the doctor said she could sit up. That was also when the doctor okayed the retrieval of Jane’s notebook, which she was glad for, since there wasn’t much to do in bed all day. Thor ended up having to snatch it out of her hands most nights and insist she get to sleep, or else she’d stay up half the night writing in it. Another week after that the doctor let her start taking short walks along the upstairs hallway. He didn’t have any crutches in the house that fit her, so she had to lean on Thor for support instead. It hurt, but the doctor wasn’t going to let her leave until she worked through it and could at least hobble around on her own. That took another week. 

All told it was nearly a month before the doctor sent Jane home, with a prescription to sleep on the couch until she could handle stairs with ease, and to get eight solid hours of sleep every night. When Thor got her back to the house, it looked as if nothing had ever happened. The couch cushions where she’d bled had been turned over, and her glimpse into the kitchen showed that it was back to normal, although the broken window had been boarded up tightly.

Tony and Pepper welcomed her home with hugs, and revealed a small cake that they’d baked for her. Chocolate cake, in fact. Jane reveled in it, savoring every bite. She wondered where they’d gotten the ingredients. 

“We reached an agreement with the townspeople,” Pepper said. “Protection in return for _donations._ ”

Tony made air quotes as Pepper said the word ‘donations.’

“Yes, donations!” Pepper said. “We’re not the mob. We aren’t going to let bad things happen to them just because they don’t have anything to spare.”

“Anyway, the point is, a few nights ago I saved old Mrs Thibodeau’s chickens from being stolen by a neighbor. She gave me a dozen eggs in thanks.” Tony said.

Jane grinned around a mouthful of cake. She could just picture Tony soaring around in the air at night, and spotting a bad guy breaking into an old woman’s chicken coop.

“I once saved New York City from an invading alien army.” Tony sighed, defeated. “Now I save chickens.”

“Even chickens need a good rescuing every once in a while,” Jane said. 

They all finished their cake, and Tony and Pepper wandered off, leaving Thor and Jane alone in the living room.

“Jane, there is something I wish to tell you,” Thor said thoughtfully, rubbing at his beard. “Something happened the night you were hurt.”

“What happened?”

“I tried to use Mjolnir to call down the lightning, but it did not work.”

Jane’s eyes went wide. “What?! Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

Thor had obviously been hanging around the humans too long, because he simply gave her an _are you joking?_ look. “I knew your mind would be caught up in this new problem. I wanted to wait until your body had recovered enough.”

Jane might have normally been annoyed, but her leg twinged, and she was just glad that he cared that much about her. “You’re probably right. But that’s... no lightning? Huh.” Something clicked in her brain. The fact that natural elements like lightning were afflicted too... that gave her a new direction.

Thor wordlessly handed over her notebook, and she smiled in gratitude. It was amazing how well he could read her. Jane wondered again, briefly, if she had managed to speak the words _I love you_ aloud those few weeks back as she laid in her recovery bed, but she lost her courage about it. And she had this new problem to work out.

She unsnapped the notebook and started scribbling her thoughts.

***

Jane had come up with a theory, but she wasn’t ready to share it yet. Instead she made Thor fetch her things; parts and wires from Tony’s stash of electronics, tools, one of the arc reactors, and her cell phone. She turned the living room into a lab, and the only one allowed in was Thor, who would drag her away during meal times. Tony once tried to ask what she was up to, and insisted he could help. She refused. “I’ll jinx it if I say anything out loud,” she’d said. Tony just held up his hands and left her to it.

Jane felt she was close to a breakthrough. Not that she could solve the problem, but she was almost sure she knew what the problem was. Which was a step in the right direction. It took her several days to build the equipment she needed to do the test which would either confirm or refute her theory. But she put the finishing touches on one last connection with her soldering iron and proclaimed it done. 

Thor was there - he’d been there all along, rarely leaving her side as he’d promised - and although he didn’t understand what she was talking about, he listened intently as she described her testing device. She had hooked up an ammeter to her cell phone battery, and interfaced the ammeter to the arc reactor. Except for some reason Tony didn’t have an ammeter in his tools, so she’d had to build one of those first. 

“I’m going to see just what’s happening to the electricity,” she said. She put her fingers over the gauge of the ammeter, then hit the power button on her phone. 

The phone didn’t turn on, but Jane squeaked.

“What? What is it?” Thor asked.

“Did you see that?” 

Thor shrugged.

Jane popped the battery out of the phone, then put it back in. She told Thor to get in close, and stare at the needle of the ammeter. Then she hit power on the phone again.

She looked expectantly at Thor. “It... twitched.” He said.

“Yes!” Jane exclaimed.

“I do not understand the significance.”

“Well when you told me about the lightning, that just didn’t make any sense. Lightning is a natural byproduct of the Earth’s ecosystem. You can’t not have lightning. If the planet just suddenly stopped making it of its own accord, then that would mean the whole ecosystem is messed up. And it’s obviously not, it still snows, and there’s clouds.”

Thor nodded, understanding a little due to his innate connection with storms. “You can not have one without the other.”

“Right. So that would mean lightning _is_ being produced. It’s just not making it all the way into lightning bolts. So, where’s it going?”

Thor shook his head.

“Okay, well, that I _don’t_ know. But it’s going somewhere. I just tested the battery on my phone. It’s not _dead_ dead. There was a very brief surge of electricity being produced, before it disappeared.”

“How does electricity disappear?”

“Well, it doesn’t. That’s not how thermodynamics works. It’s being... absorbed. By something. Something is sucking the electricity out, before it has a chance to do what it does. Whether that be powering a cell phone or making a bolt of lightning.”

“So this _is_ something intentional,” Thor mused.

“It has to be. I can’t think of anything natural that would do this. I just haven’t figured out how someone could make this happen, yet. And I don’t know if that’s the only point, or if they’re channeling that electricity somewhere else, or what. But this can’t be natural.”

“And if it is unnatural, then it can be rectified.” Thor growled.

“Whoa, there,” Jane grinned. “We haven’t gotten quite that far yet.”

“No, but you will.” Thor’s confidence in her made her heart skip a beat. 

“C’mere,” she said, and drew him into a kiss. It was an emotional kiss, but not fevered and desperate like that night on the living room floor. Jane pulled away but left a hand on his cheek, feeling the scratchy beard beneath. “I love you.”

The words had just popped out. She hadn’t meant to say them, though she’d been thinking on and off again of how to arrange the circumstances nicely to create the perfect opportunity to say it. This wasn’t anything close to the scenarios she’d worked up in her mind, but it worked. It felt perfect.

“And I love you.” Thor smiled. He looked almost relieved.

“What?” Jane asked.

“You said the same when you were ill. I just was not sure if you truly meant it.”

Ah, so she had said it aloud. All that worrying for nothing. “I did. I just didn’t know how to say it, I guess.”

Thor threaded his hand into the hair at the back of Jane’s head, pulling her in for another kiss. She knew she wasn’t 100% healed, but that didn’t account for all the lightheadedness. Thor was just an excellent kisser.

He tried to end the kiss, but Jane wouldn’t let him. She put her hands behind his neck, keeping him from moving. They’d been sitting on the floor, and now she got on her knees and moved closer to him. The movement made her injured leg muscle twinge, but she ignored it. Thor’s body felt wonderfully warm and solid against her own, especially since he wasn’t wearing his armor, but Earth clothes. Thor’s hands went to her waist, and she felt his thumbs come up under her shirt and brush against her stomach. It sent little waves of heat through her, all the way up to her scalp and back down to her toes. God, she wanted him.

It had been a while since she’d last been with a man, but even so, none of them had made her feel that way just with a few kisses and brief touches. But Jane didn’t have time to dwell, since Thor had lifted her into his arms and was heading towards the stairs.

“What are you doing?” Jane asked.

“The doctor said no stairs,” Thor replied, grinning. 

“I love you,” Jane said again.

He took her to her bedroom, and there Jane showed him just how much she loved him.

***

It was mid-March by now, and the arctic edge that the air held was starting to soften, just a bit. The sun shone brighter and for longer. Jane laid with her head on Thor’s chest, alternately listening to his heartbeat beneath her and the steady _drip-drip-drip_ of the melting icicles outside the window. It was comforting.

“We should go downstairs,” Jane said, though she made no effort to move.

Thor just hummed in reply.

“I think I hear Pepper and Tony down there. I should tell them what I discovered.”

“Mmhmm,” Thor said. He didn’t move either, though. 

Jane put her chin on his chest and stared at him. Thor’s eyes were closed, but his arm, resting around her shoulders, tightened reflexively. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” Jane teased. “I need you to carry me down the stairs anyhow.”

Thor opened his eyes and looked at her. “Promise me that.”

“What?”

“That you will never go anywhere.”

Jane sighed. She shifted onto her side and nestled into the crook of his arm. “You know I can’t promise that.” 

“Please?”

Jane laid her hand on his chest. “I promise, to the best of my abilities, that I will never go anywhere, Thor.”

He tilted her chin up and kissed her.

“Good.”

***

Once Tony heard about Jane’s discoveries, that sent him on a new binge of research. The two of them ended up spending a lot of time sprawled out in the living room, tossing ideas back and forth, and doing various tests on electrical devices. 

Thor and Pepper were annoyed by the fact there was now _two_ obsessed scientists that had to be forced to eat meals. In addition, Thor took over Tony’s regular peacekeeping patrol duties (only after much convincing on Jane’s part, that she would be fine without him by her side 24/7). Tony had come up with a theory, though Jane wasn’t convinced. He proposed that the only thing that could do this was mechanical - no magic - and that the only mechanical things that could work over the entire planet but not be seen or heard, was nanites.

To prove his point, Tony took off for New York, to retrieve a high-powered microscope. When he got back, he had the microscope in tow, but his attitude was grim. He relayed how Stark Tower had been trashed, floor by floor. Most of the city was in terrible disarray. But at that point, it was also mostly deserted. People had rioted and then they had either starved or left. 

Jane asked about her Einstein-Rosen Bridge device. Tony said it was gone. Either destroyed, or somehow someone knew what it was, and took it. He said he also swung by SHIELD headquarters and the place was empty, and looked like it had been for a while. Jane remarked on just how coincidental that was, and Tony agreed. But it wasn’t something they could worry about then.

He set up the microscope, hooking it up to an arc reactor for power. If they were nanites, then they should be everywhere. Tony grabbed a wire and pulled off a tiny strand of copper from inside it, and stuck it inside the microscope. He twiddled the dials and looked through the eyepiece. After a minute, he uttered a resounding _son of a bitch._

Jane looked through the microscope herself. “You’re kidding me,” she said, amazed.

There, plain as day, was a bevy of unbelievably tiny mechanical devices: spherical, but with appendages shooting off in all directions, and a dense center of circuitry. There was a dozen of them, crawling all over the wire. She itched at her skin, feeling the phantom trails of nanites all over her, even though they were much too small for humans to feel.

“I was right!” Tony said. “C’mon. Say it.”

Jane snorted. “No way! You wouldn’t have even gotten this far without me.”

“Foster. I would say it if the situations were reversed. This is part of the scientist’s code. You know that.”

She sighed melodramatically. “Fine. You were right, Tony. You were right, and I was wrong.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Was that so hard?”

They called in Thor and Pepper to reveal their discovery, although they weren’t as particularly impressed as Jane and Tony had been. Thor examined his skin as if he was looking for the nanites, and Pepper declared it gross.

“How can we defeat these ‘nanites’?” Thor asked.

“I don’t know,” Jane said, and looked at Tony. “EMP?”

“Maybe. Not everything can be taken out by EMP, though.”

“EM-what?” Pepper asked.

“Electromagnetic pulse,” Jane supplied. “But these nanites are so advanced. It’s impossible to tell what they run on.”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s no way to create a large enough EMP to cover the entire planet, while also not killing everyone in the process.” Tony stroked his chin.

“We could try reprogramming them,” Jane suggested.

“Do you have any experience with nanites, Foster?” Tony asked skeptically.

“No,” she said.

“Well fortunately for you, I do.” Tony looked through the microscope and heaved a sigh. “If only I still had my lab in Malibu.”

“You were the one that advertised the address,” Pepper said haughtily.

Tony looked at her and narrowed his eyes. “Mistakes were made, okay. Can we move on from that? Please?”

“No, never,” Pepper said, and crossed her arms, smiling sweetly.

“Is there no other lab you could use?” Thor cut in.

“No, but I don’t need one,” Tony replied, and Pepper swatted his arm. “Jarvis?”

“Yes, sir?” 

“I need to build me a nanite-reprogrammer.”

“Of course, sir.” Jarvis managed to sound put out, but the rest of them left Tony to build the computer he would need to accomplish the task.

***

It took Tony much longer than he thought to build the computer. He kept having to fly out of town to locate parts, and so many places he knew to check for what had been trashed, raided, or burnt down. 

Pepper, Jane, and Thor kept up the usual tasks around the house, but Pepper could tell when she was a third wheel, and often left the other two to their own devices. Jane and Thor had started taking short walks around the property. Jane’s leg was getting stronger every day, and she was glad to be moving around again and feeling the sun on her face. 

The snow was still deep on the ground, but there were many well-travelled paths from their usual activity, and they would walk these paths, hand in hand. Once in a while a visitor came by to call on Thor for help with something, since Iron Man was still busy, and then later the next day they would come back with a bag of rice or a box of candles or some other small token of their appreciation. Jane could see why Pepper didn’t like it - it did feel slightly wrong to be taking needy people’s supplies - but it was also an unfortunate necessity. None of them were particularly able to provide for themselves, not while they were wrapped up in dealing with the nanite issue, and Jane was still recovering. 

And, Jane reasoned, if Tony could reprogram the nanites, and turn the power back on... then it wouldn’t matter. They’d have saved _everybody._

So Jane and Thor accepted the townspeople’s tokens of appreciation. Thor took her into town a few times, and introduced her around. He’d been there a lot, helping with many of the public works projects the town had come together to design. Apparently the help Tony and Thor had been providing to the town evolved from simple protection to helping with large scale projects, such as a greenhouse, heated by several woodstoves, in which the town had a community farm; a large public bath house with a simplistic heated pool design; and even some sadly necessary things, such as a mass grave on the edge of town. 

Jane marveled at how this tiny town had managed to work together rather than fracture apart, like New York City had. But she supposed in a small town like this, people were used to making do, and relying on each other. Even if they couldn’t get the power back, Jane thought there would still be some hope in small towns like this.

They even visited Doctor Hoyt, and Jane hugged him and thanked him for treating her.

“No need to thank me,” the doctor said. “Your man here has come by several times to help me out. I ran out of some basic supplies a while ago. Thor here went and got me some more.”

Jane grinned at his use of the term _your man_ again, thinking how it wasn’t so wrong anymore. She reached for Thor’s hand. “Good. But I’m still thanking you anyway.” 

The doctor just nodded and smiled. “And it’s appreciated.”

They didn’t tell any of the townspeople what they were up to - no need to get their hopes up in case they weren’t successful. But they knew that Tony Stark was a genius, they knew that he was an Avenger, they knew he was “busy” even though he kept himself holed up in the house several miles outside of town, and they also knew he went flying off every now and again and wouldn’t return for hours. Their eyes all held a hopeful look every time Thor and Jane came to town. 

Well, most of them anyway. Some of the townspeople didn’t seem all that bothered by the blackout. Some of them seemed as if their lives went on just like normal. Those people were comforting, somehow, with their unperturbed attitudes.

Finally, three weeks after he’d begun, and well into April, Tony had finished what he’d started. He had build a computer capable of interfacing with a nanite, and he’d designed software to potentially reprogram one. Jane tried to help, but he rebuffed her, the same way she’d rebuffed him, so she understood. Sometimes you just had to work things out on your own. Tony set to work understanding the nanite code.

***

There was a bird chirping outside the window on the day Tony announced he’d done it. It was fat, and crimson red, and Jane had no idea what kind of bird it was, but she’d always remember it, as if it as a harbinger of good news.

“I’ve finished rewriting the nanite’s code. I just have to upload it to the nanite, and it should spread on its own.” Tony was sitting in the middle of the floor, crouching at his homemade computer, which was set up on the coffee table. He was in a pair of jeans and an A-shirt with a couple stains down the front, and Jane could just see a bit of the scar on his chest peaking out from the neckline. His hair was greasy and unkempt - he clearly hadn’t bathed in several days. 

Good lord, was this what she looked like when she went on a science bender?

“How does it do that?” Thor asked.

“The base code for the nanites have a self-replicating module built in. Any changes made to the program is automatically transferred to all nearby nanites. It will take a while to propagate over the whole planet, but once it does...” Tony snapped his finger. “The power should be back.”

“What did you change in the code?” Jane asked, peering at his screen, which was a mess of programming language she didn’t understand.

“The nanites are designed to siphon off electricity. I don’t quite know _how_ they do it. I’d need to study the code for months to figure it out. But I found the right parts of the code to turn that off. It was really a matter of changing about a half dozen true/false values. I just had to figure out which were the relevant values.”

Jane was skeptical. “That easy?”

“Well, we’ll see. But there’s one thing our unknown nanite designer didn’t count on.”

“What’s that?” Jane asked.

“Me.” Tony grinned, and hit enter on his keyboard. 

A progress bar popped up, showing an upload meter. It didn’t take long before the bar was 100% green, and the nanite’s program was successfully updated.

“Now we wait.”

***

Tony and Jane had each tried to do a few calculations to guess how long it would take to propagate the code update the entire planet’s infestation of nanites, but since they could only guess how many nanites existed, it was impossible to come up with a solid estimate. 

But they waited, for days, and occasionally Tony would interface with a random nanite he scraped off of something and confirm that his code update was present. It had already altered all the nanites in their area.

It was near the end of April, and the snow had all but melted completely off the ground. Jane’s leg only gave off the occasional twinge, so she and Thor enjoyed longer walks. They decided to go into town one night, because they’d heard that some of the townspeople had gotten together to form a band and were going to perform some songs. A celebration of the warmer weather. Thor flew them most of the way there anyway, but it was nice to walk down the street and feel relatively normal.

The group of musicians were performing on a stage in the middle of the street that Thor had helped build. They were doing a mix of old country songs and some bluegrass. It was upbeat music that reverberated through the town and bounced off the trees surrounding the small town. Some of the townspeople were dancing, and it made Jane smile. She spotted Doctor Hoyt across the crowd, and waved. He waved back. 

Thor stood behind Jane, his arms around her, and his cheek brushing the side of her head. She hadn’t felt this happy and secure in a long time, despite the crazy situation they were in. Jane put her hands on Thor’s arms and squeezed gently. 

The band was in the middle of a particularly raucous number with a banjo and two guitars, when an explosion from behind them made everyone scream. Jane and Thor whipped around. Thor looked ready to call Mjolnir, which he’d left by the side of the road when they got to town, but Jane put a hand on his arm. “Wait,” she said.

She identified the source of the explosion. A transformer on the top of a pole at the end of the street was throwing off a few sparks. Her heart leapt into her chest. The power!

Jane wasn’t the only one to notice. A few of the townspeople had located the source of the noise too, and were now excitedly pointing. 

A shrill voice rang out from the crowd: “My phone works!”

Thor grinned. “It worked!” he proclaimed. Jane jumped into his arms and he spun her around. 

A few nearby townspeople heard, and came to slap Thor and Jane on the back, saying how they knew they were up to something out there in the woods. 

After a few minutes, Tony showed up in the Iron Man suit, Pepper at his side. The crowd gave a cheer, and Tony obliged their celebration by flipping up his facemask, gracing them with a smile, and throwing up a couple peace signs.

Thor and Jane stood off to the side, watching Tony take the spotlight. 

“He is an attention hound,” Thor grumbled. “You had as much to do with this success as he.”

Jane grinned. “I don’t care. He can take the spotlight. He’ll also take all the crap, later. And he’ll owe me forever.”

“You are too magnanimous to the likes of Tony Stark,” Thor said. “But I love you for it.”

“And I love you,” she echoed Thor’s earlier words. Jane reached for his hand, and he took it.

The electricity wasn’t working in people’s homes, yet. The power surge blew the transformers, and the power plants likely needed to be shut down and repaired before they could run smoothly again. It would be a long road before the world was back to normal. Jane was happy to spend it in the little farmhouse in the woods. 

“Let’s go home,” she said to Thor. She kissed him soundly, a kiss of promise. “I’ve got another Einstein-Rosen Bridge device to build.”


End file.
